Tag: worldview

Starving for Worldviews

~ Silver V ~ Leave a comment

I have before talked about how to use monsters to advance worldviews and have suggested using ancient worldviews as scaffold for modern ones. I have also made attempts to figure out how worldviews evolve (although I think the previous analysis missed some crucial points).

In this essay I redefined worldview, and explain the modern problem of being starved for worldviews and propose how to solve it.

 

What is a Worldview?

A Worldview, is a “coherent collection of concepts allowing us to construct a global image of the world, and in this way to understand as many elements of our experience as possible.” (1)

Philosophy is – under this view – an attempt to answer the questions of worldview, that is, philosophy is the method to answer the problems posed by Worldviews.

Question Philosophical Discipline
1. What is? Ontology (model of reality as a whole)
2. Where does it all come from? Explanation (model of the past)
3. Where are we going? Prediction (model of the future)
4. What is good and what is evil? Axiology (theory of values)
5. How should we act? Praxeology (theory of actions)
6. What is true and what is false? Epistemology (theory of knowledge)

 

The Need for a worldview

Firstly, we “(…) all need a certain worldview, even if it is not made fully explicit, to interact with our world. There is a practical need to have at least an implicit, pre-ontological and for that reason “naive” answer for each of the worldview questions.” (1)

Further, in our modern times, we face a particular problem of meaningness. Here is David Chapman on it: “The atomized mode takes incoherence for granted. It does not seem a problem, in this mode; we don’t need systems. Meanings do not hang together. They are delivered as bite-sized morsels in a jumbled stream, like sushi flowing past on a conveyer belt, or brilliant shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Or—to use the thing itself as a metaphor for itself—like Twitter.

The problems we have now: Throughout the twentieth century, from the beginning of the breakdown of the mainstream systems until the breakdown of subcultures, the underlying worry was “not enough meaning.” The atomized mode delivers, for the first time, way too much meaning. It is overwhelming, like trying to drink from a firehose.

Because the shards of meaning do not relate with each other, it’s impossible to compare them. There is no standard of value, so everything seems equally trivial. The collapse of subcultural community has atomized society, and we find it impossible to construct satisfactory selves from the jagged fragments of meaning we’re bombarded with.”

Modernisation and increasing specialisation led to fragmentation, distillation and diffusion of meaning and experiences. This diffusion lead to clashes.

As our world becomes further modernised and globalised the types of experiences available become incredibly diverse. This is a really short list of possible subcultures one can belong to (each reflecting a inchoate worldview). Then there is the different worldview tidbits one gets bombed with using any sort of media or under any sort of conversation. And finally, through social media, the need to present a coherent self-image to others, and thus to oneself.

 

Attempted Solutions

Traditional worldviews, which offered an integrated view of the world have failed:

“The religious worldview has no rational mechanism to resolve issues or disagreements; it gives no answer to contemporary developments, and thus is non-adaptive. There is a fundamentalism aspect in them. The traditional reductionist scientific worldview maintain determinism, claim that there is no goal- directedness, and thus no meaning. Holistic worldviews (e.g. “New Age”) are too fuzzy, irrational and impractical.

A humanistic worldview is too anthropocentric; it should consider seriously man in its broader context (evolutionary, ecological, cosmological, etc…). It can’t deal with problems such as the so-called singularity. What about a humanistic worldview if man had to disappear to let place to intelligent machines? Individualism is a value so widespread that it could be interpreted as a worldview. It is often viewed as the main problem of our society. On one side, it can mean one different worldview per person, and thus, no shared worldview. This lead to the claim that no worldview is better than another . To its extreme, this implies no common values and thus no common goals (relativism).”

Philosophy has failed as well to provide us with a worldview. Continental philosophy builds castles on moving sands, and analytic philosophy sets forests on fire. One has the virtue of a broad outlook, the other the virtue of clarity and precision. Yet a broad outlook without precision leads you to being not-even-wrong and clear destruction without any building effort leads you to blindness.

Traditional worldviews and philosophy have failed to live up to the challenge. In response, there have been two answers: trying to hold on to dead worldviews or trying to build new ones piece-meal.

Consumerism and Fundamentalism are the main choices for holding on to macro-shared wolrdviews. At the micro-level you have buffet like offer from rational AI focused, to reactionaries, to secular appropriations of religion.

I choose these examples because they are so different and yet are all an answer this same very modern problem: the jaggedness of meaning and the lack of a worldview that makes sense of our more-diverse-than-ever experience.

Fundamentally, there is problem of a mismatch between our worldview needs – given our drowning in meaning shards – and our worldview offers – given the the impact of modernisation and specialisation, and the failure of traditional worldviews and philosophy to live up to the challenge.

I call this mismatch between our need for worldviews, given our drowning in meaning, and the lack of encompassing, broad, responsible solutions that answer the problem our being starved for worldviews. We cannot make sense of incredibly diverse experiences.

 

Proposed solution: Worldview Building

I think that the ones building worldviews are taking the right step. We need not only continental and analytic philosophy, we need – more than ever – synthetic philosophy. This was what I called for with Modern(ised) philosophies for living.

Vidal (1) takes an interesting approach to worlview building.  He starts with a toy problem: building a scientific worldview – a worldview that unifies the finding from the various sciences. To do so he proposes a language, a stance and a guiding idea. The language is that of systems theory, the stance is that of problem-solving, and the guiding idea is evolution.

I don’t want to go into detail on his views just yet, but I do want to discuss some of his desiderata for a worldview.


space

Desiderata of a worldview

 

One vs Many

Should one hold one worldview or have various and trigger conditions for shifting between worldviews? On the one hand singular worldviews have been dangerous in the past, on the other our problem is drowning in meaning shards.

My intuition is that many is best. Information will have to compressed and any particular worldview will either leave something out or be incoherent. Which leads to the second desiderata.

 

Completeness vs coherence

Should we aim for completeness or for coherence first? Here I side with Eugine:

“Also keep in mind that it’s more important to make your beliefs as correct as possible then to make them as consistent as possible. Of course the ultimate truth is both correct and consistent; however, it’s perfectly possible to make your beliefs less correct by trying to make them more consistent. If you have two beliefs that do a decent job of modeling separate aspects of reality, it’s probably a good idea to keep both around, even if they seem to contradict each other. For example, both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics do a good job modeling (parts of) reality despite being inconsistent and we want to keep both of them. Now think about what happens when a similar situation arises in a field, e.g., biology, psychology, your personal life, where evidence is messier then it is in physics.”

 

No single man

This may be the toughest point for intellectuals to come to terms with. Ever since the knowledge explosion that one cannot know everything. This means that one has to rely on others for his worldview building efforts.

Having said that, there are high leverage concepts that illuminate whole areas of knowledge – like the theory of evolution by natural selection, or the idea of legibility and non-predictive control – and yes, the details are messy, but one can check it for coherence against other areas, then.

Secondly, there are various forms of intelligence augmentation in the form of cognitive tools, and this trend can be expected to continue.

Thirdly, one can craft heuristics to figure out how to get knowledge faster. (What I’ve been doing in my analysis of map-making)

 

Conclusion

We have analysed the origin of our drowning in meaning and our corresponding starvation for worldviews. We have seen how contemporary approaches have mainly failed at answering this problem. We have also sketched some desiderata for worldview building that will guide further attempts.

 

(1) Vidal, Clément (2008) What is a worldview? [Book Chapter] (In Press)

(2) Vidal, C. (2007). An enduring philosophical agenda. Worldview construction as a philosophical method.

 

 

 

 

Future:

Modern(ised) Philosophies for Living

~ Silver V ~ 1 Comment

I have a love-hate relationship with contemporary philosophy. I’m in the love with the need for it, the idea of it, the concept of it. But contemporary philosophy mostly annoys me.

Life is for living, and I want a practical philosophy of life, not reinterpretations of what Husserl thought that Kant thought about noema. I once read a description of modern philosophy and it went something like “Nature has cursed them with feeble bodies, and they take revenge by creating artificial systems.” And I think this is somewhat unfair, but not totally unfair.

Yes, thought, yes considerations, yes thinking, yes reflecting. But not to the exception of all else.

Plato means “broad shoulders” – Plato was, besides a philosopher, a champion wrestler.

Sure, we got through scholasticism in which we wasted our best philosophical minds to the study of theology.

And yes, sometimes ontology and metaphysics seem to be too far from real life to be of any use and I think they matter a bunch, and yes we need philosophy to examine our presuppositions. Sure. But not to the exclusion of all else.

And maybe I’m strawmanning all the way to Hell, but maybe not.

Modernised Philosophies for Living

On the difference between analytical and Continental philosophy:

“The heart of the analytic/Continental opposition is most evident in methodology, that is, in a focus on analysis or on synthesis. Analytic philosophers typically try to solve fairly delineated philosophical problems by reducing them to their parts and to the relations in which these parts stand. Continental philosophers typically address large questions in a synthetic or integrative way, and consider particular issues to be ‘parts of the larger unities’ and as properly understood and dealt with only when fitted into those unities.” (p.10.)

So analytic philosophy is concerned with analysis – analysis of thought, language, logic, knowledge, mind, etc; whereas continental philosophy is concerned with synthesis – synthesis of modernity with history, individuals with society, and speculation with application.

Neil Levy sees this methodological difference as well; in Metaphilosophy, Vol. 34, No 3, he describes analytic philosophy as a “problem-solving activity,” and continental philosophy as closer “to the humanistic traditions and to literature and art… it tends to be more ‘politically engaged.” Hans-Johann Glock remarks in  The Rise of Analytic Philosophy that “analytic philosophy is a respectable science or skill; it uses specific techniques to tackle discrete problems with definite results.”

So maybe philosophies for living would not be found in philosophy anymore and I’m just looking in the wrong place (1). It seems like therapy might be a place where to find them.

Scott talks about his field view on CBT: “I was taught the following foundation myth of my field: in the beginning, psychiatry was a confused amalgam of Freud and Jung and Adler and anyone else who could afford an armchair to speculate in. People would say things like that neurosis was caused by wanting to have sex with your mother, or by secretly wanting a penis, or goodness only knows what else. Then someone had the bright idea that beliefs ought to be based on evidence! Study after study proved the psychoanalysts’ bizarre castles were built on air, and the Freudians were banished to the outer darkness. Their niche was filled by newer scientific psychotherapies with a robust evidence base, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and [mumble]. And thus was the empire forged.”

CBT seems to be all the rage in rationalist circles because it is evidence-based. (It certainly is not because of how it appeals to the idea of “Change your thought patterns, change your life”, which of course is what debiasing appeals to.)

And CBT is mostly a rebranding and refashioning of Roman Stoic Philosophy.

Stoicism being, obviously, a philosophy for living:

  • If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now. (VIII. 47, trans. George Long)
  • Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust or lose your sense of shame or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill-will or hypocrisy or a desire for things best done behind closed doors. (III. 7, trans. Gregory Hays)
  • Not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit you’ve embarked on. (V. 9, trans. Gregory Hays)
  • […] As for others whose lives are not so ordered, he reminds himself constantly of the characters they exhibit daily and nightly at home and abroad, and of the sort of society they frequent; and the approval of such men, who do not even stand well in their own eyes has no value for him. (III. 4, trans. Maxwell Staniforth)
  • Take away your opinion, and there is taken away the complaint, […] Take away the complaint, […] and the hurt is gone (IV. 7, trans. George Long)
  • Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good. (IV. 17, trans. George Long)
  • Of the life of man the duration is but a point. (II. 17, trans. C.R. Haines)

So maybe the least resistance path is to modernise old philosophies for living? Paint them in the modern color and use those as scaffolds to build off? (As this attempt at painting a rational, scientific, naturalistic take on Daoism)

Modernising Philosophies for Living

As far as I can see this idea of “philosophy of life” is reduced to a profile detail in dating websites. I also understand that to question worldview in such a way you need to reach a certain ego level. But I think this is very much a necessary project.

Religion has provided guidelines for years, and with the death of god fast approaching this project will be increasingly needed. (Most people that stop being deistic keep up remnants of Christianity – the case I know – once they leave it. Belief propagation isn’t automatic, it is a painfully long process. European society is built on Christianity. I don’t know what will happen when this particular Schelling point for morality and social behaviour is gone. Maybe just fundamentalism and consumerism. Hopefully.)

And I think the thesis above is great and that it needs to get out of paper and be acted upon and distributed. And I think CBT is great, but that the barrier of having to seek out therapy and find it is too high for it to be distributed.

But there is something that is not too high, in fact, that has a low barrier to entry, given the way humans are built: religion.

And this is why I’m so excited about Chapman’s effort to naturalise Buddhist Tantra. Tantra is for living, and life is to be lived.

Tantra is “an attitude; a stance; a way of being. It is the attitude of passionate and spacious engagement with this world. It is an ecstatic and agonizing love-affair with everyday reality.” “The excitement starts when you realize there is a whole religion built on this attitude. There is a system for putting the vision into practice, for intensifying and developing it, for making everything you do consistent with it.”

Yes, please.

spaces

spaces

Future:

  • Philosophy can’t deal with these earthly concerns because the sociology of intellectuals is such that you gain attention by being more abstract and reflexive, and lose it by being less
  • Why was there an explosion of schools go philosophy for living in ancient Greece, China?
  • http://kevinsimler.quora.com/ on post-atheism
  • secular solstice

 

Harvesting monsters to advance worldviews

~ Silver V ~ 3 Comments

“Life is a creative endeavour”

Intro

Creativity is a huge topic.

I want to talk about one specific theory that I like for almost aesthetic reasons.  It is different from all others – that seemingly went nowhere -, 2) it is non-insanely argued for, 3) it fits my worldview and 4) the project of this blog well.(These are good reasons if you take the data/frame theory seriously – which I do, kinda, for the time being – basically any mapping trumps no mapping. And “aesthetic” here means “fits with the rest of my mappings” which is a further point in favor. )There is an artsy intro here  and a mathy one here.

 

The Honing Theory of Creativity

Most accounts of creativity is model it through a process model. According to the originator of the Honing Theory – Gabora -, creativity is actually the transformation of the world that results from the interaction between the uniqueness of the worldview of the creator and the creative task at hand.

Gabora defines a worldview as “an internal mental model of reality. It is not just a compendium of knowledge, values, and so forth, but a manner of weaving them into an integrated web of understandings; a way of seeing the world and being in the world.”

She says that Honing theory is a theory of creativity that “proposes that the creative process arises due to the self-organizing, self-mending nature of a worldview. Honing theory views the creative outcome as the external manifestation of internal cognitive restructuring brought about through immersion in a creative act. You could almost think of the creative product as the byproduct of a creative process; a physical indication that the creator sees and feels the world differently after engaging in the creative act, that his or her worldview was changed by it. That’s why creativity is therapeutic, and why there is such a thing as art therapy, music therapy, and so forth.”

 

Honing theory and worldview

She further details the concept of worldview thus:  “Our capacity to adapt ideas to new situations, see one thing in terms of another, blend concepts together in an endless variety of ways to interpret and express real or imagined situations, are all indicative of the integrated nature of a human worldview

The modern mind can form abstract concepts, combine information from different domains (as in analogical reasoning), adapt views and actions to new circumstances, and communicate using the complex syntax and recursive embedding characteristic of modern human languages. It can frame new experiences in terms of previous ones, solve problems using whatever potentially relevant information it can obtain, and formulate plans of action that reflect the specifics of a situation. In short, a modern human behaves as if items in memory are integrated into what we will refer to as a worldview that provide a big picture of what is going on. Its mind is much more than a collection of isolated memories, concepts, attitudes, and so forth; it is a manner of navigating them, weaving narratives with them, and thereby better understanding and interacting with the world.”

A worldview is the totality of one’s map (and/or maps?and/or metamaps? and/or beliefs? and/or aliefs? ): “one’s internal mental model of reality, or distinctive way of ‘seeing and being in’ the world. A human worldview is a unique tapestry of understanding that is autopoietic in that the whole emerges through interactions amongst the parts. It is also self-mending in the sense that, just as injury to the body spontaneously evokes physiological changes that bring about healing, events that are problematic or surprising or generate cognitive dissonance spontaneously evoke streams of thought that attempt to solve the problem or reconcile the dissonance”.”

When she says that worldviews are self organising and self mending she means that  that creative output is a reflection of the tendency of worldviews to resolve states of potentiality through self-organized transformation – through the re-integration of a fragmented worldview.

The process of creativity is thus that of breaking the current worldview and having creative products result as by-products of putting it back together in a manner that integrates what broke the previous worldview in the first place.

Honing, in turn, is the process of interaction between conceptions of task and internally or externally generated contexts until the creative task is well defined. It is through honing that one reaches a self-made worldview: “Individuals with self-made worldviews don’t simply acquire knowledge; they make it their own, reframe it in their own terms, relate it to their own experiences, put their own slant on it, adapt it to their needs, and familiar modes of self expression.”

The theory has some evidence going for it. One being that it predicts that creative output depends on unique worldview. There is reason to believe that might be the case.

 

The Monster Harvest

Weltanschauung-diaphtheiros seem to sit on a continuum. On the one extreme sits humor causing mirth as a degenerate case, followed by stuff that we call “interesting” (Think the whole of Ribbonfarm and the superstimuli Sister Y calls “insight porn”.) On the other there are those forms that suggest themselves into destroying everything you ever took for real, good, true, meaningful, desirable, or identified with.

I suspect that the *tougher* the worldview breaker, the more one has to mend, and the more encompassing and unique the new worldview (Which would partially explain why people think creativity requires insanity and has a dark side (1))

If my speculations are correct, then the larger, more encompassing, flexible, vivid, real worldviews – which entail accurate maps (insofar as accurate applies) -, will result from self-mending caused by seeking out, exposing oneself to and embracing lovecraftian monsters.

 

  1. – Cropley, A. J., Kaufman, J. C., & Runco, M. A. (2010). The dark side of creativity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

 

 

 

Future:

  • Connect to idea of postrationality of having S1 and S2 talk; associative and analytical thought; learning how to learn
  • https://people.ok.ubc.ca/lgabora/papers/2012/mf-chapter07.pdf -> desiquilibrium leads to creativity. according to cook greuter it also leads to “higher” worldviews
  • She theorises that art is the evidence of a mind trying to mend a gap in one’s worldview. This connects really well to narrative therapy, constructed stories, gendlin’s description of focusing therapy, and the autobiographical self.  Cannot avoid stories?
  • Simon said rationality is a scissors with one blade being the cognitive limitations and the other the environment. Is this related here? One blade being the worldview, the other one the task?
  • “That’s why creativity is therapeutic, and why there is such a thing as art therapy, music therapy, and so forth”
    • almost as if the process of creativity was related to Gendlin’s idea of having a felt shift by managing to symbolize or conceptualize the felt sense/meaning
  • Check her hypotheses about the tendencies of worldviews against what Koltko Rivera says about them (Is he the leading/only worldview researcher?)
  • how far can you stretch the paradigm/worldview metaphor?
    • prescience, normal science, revolution, normal science – kuhn; preworldview, worldview, TENSION, new normal worldview – gabora 
  • Worldview and identification

 

 

Not Idea Zombiology: Idea Resurrection Biology

~ Silver V ~ 3 Comments

Zombie ideas was a term coined by Paul Krugman to refer to policy ideas that keep being killed by evidence and rising again because they suit a political agenda. The notion has since expanded to encompass ideas that are surprisingly robust, ideas that keep popping up in history, and across societies. Ideas that refuse to die, and that once killed, rise again from the grave.

I think ideas are really powerful. I don’t think I have to sell my readership on this. In what follows I first give a model of how it is that ideas get power. I then briefly touch upon mechanisms that allow undead ideas to keep rising and why Idea Zombiology is the wrong perspective.

 

The Power of Ideas

Keynes said that “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”

I think that there are mines of gold in this quote, but I need to give a frame under which to understand it. Cue Steven Pinker and his theory of societal change. He calls it a norm cascade. Here are three arguments summarizing it. (Which admittedly are not perfect but good enough to pass what Pinker means in a more precise fashion.)

 

“Norm cascade” Argument of societal change

  1. The elites favor the position for which there are rational arguments.
  2. The position with rational arguments for it is position Y.
  3. Therefore, the elites favor position Y.
  4. If there are is an intense controversy between two opposed sides to a socially fractious issue (drug legalization, abortion, capital punishment, same-sex marriage), what the elite favors becomes legal norm.
  5. There are is an intense controversy between two opposed sides to a socially fractious issue  X
  6. Therefore, position Y will become legal norm [3,4,5]
  7. If nothing terrible happens, then, people and press get bored.
  8. Nothing terrible happens.
  9. Therefore, people and press get bored [7,8]
  10. If people and press get bored, then politicians realize issue is no longer a vote-getter
  11. Therefore, politicians realize issue is no longer a vote-getter. [9, 10]
  12. If politicians realize issue is no longer a vote-getter, then politicians will not reopen the issue.
  13. Therefore, politicians will not reopen the issue. [11, 12]
  14. If politicians don’t reopen the issue, no one will.
  15. Therefore, the issue is not reopened.  [13, 14]

Argument for “People accept the status quo as correct.”

  1. People accept the status quo as correct.
  2. Y is the status quo.
  3. Therefore, people accept Y as correct.

Argument for “Extremists cement the majority consensus.”

  1. “Norm cascade” Argument of societal political change
  2. Argument for “People accept the status quo as correct.”
  3. If a group goes against majority consensus and isn’t composed of elites, it will be seen as extremist/radical,
  4. Any group proclaiming ~Y, goes against the majority consensus
  5. Therefore, any group proclaiming ~Y will be seen as extremist/radical.
  6. The majority cements its consensus by opposition to extremist group positions.
  7. Therefore, the group proclaiming ~Y being seen as extremist/radical will further cement the majority consensus

This is roughly Pinker’s model. It has two pieces that help make sense of Keynes’ quote: the “elites change minds according to rational arguments and impose their rules” and the “people accept the status quo as correct” bit. Together these explain how the ideas of intellectuals (generally) can make it into the minds of the “practical man”.

 

Idea Zombiology

As with Dawkins and memes, I think the evolutionary metaphor is a good scaffold.  As a trivial example of the power of this metaphor, ideas that push for their own replication will outlast those that don’t, and those that push more forcefully will outlast those that don’t. It’s very much an arms race between ideas.

Religions are an awesome example of this. Forced conversion, religious coercion, preachers, civilizing missions; they have it all.

Dawkins has explored the analogy between gene and idea evolution with his “meme” terminology, the scientific study of which has mostly failed as far as I can see. Nonetheless, a mine of interesting concepts lies there.

Cultural attractors

Dan Sperber has suggested the ideas of cultural attractors as something that goes beyond memes. “Well, bits of culture—memes if you want to dilute the notion and call them that—remain self-similar not because they are replicated again and again but because variations that occur at almost every turn in their repeated transmission, rather than resulting in “random walks” drifting away in all directions from an initial model, tend to gravitate around cultural attractors. Ending Little Red Riding Hood when the wolf eats the child would make for a simpler story to remember, but a Happy Ending is too powerful a cultural attractor. If a person had only heard the story ending with the wolf’s meal, my guess is that either she would not have retold it at all—and that is selection—, or she would have modified by reconstructing a happy ending—and this is attraction. Little Red Riding Hood has remained culturally stable not because it has been faithfully replicated all along, but because the variations present in all its versions have tended to cancel one another out.

Why should there be cultural attractors at all? Because there are in our minds, our bodies, and our environment biasing factors that affect the way we interpret and re-produce ideas and behaviors. (I write “re-produce” with a hyphen because, more often than not, we produce a new token of the same type without reproducing in the usual sense of copying some previous tokens.) When these biasing factors are shared in a population, cultural attractors emerge.”

 

Natural Idea Resurrection Biology

I think that he is totally wrong in saying that variations are canceling out and that “construction” is caused by attractors and somehow a non-evolutionary process (in so far as all the meme processes are evolutionary), but he suggests 1 important idea.

The idea of cultural attractors, which I’d like to rename cultural evolutionary basins of attraction. Sperber gives the following example: “Rounded numbers are cultural attractors: they are easier to remember and provide better symbols for magnitudes. So, we celebrate twentieth wedding anniversaries, hundredth issue of journals, millionth copy sold of a record, and so on. This, in turn, creates a special cultural attractor for prices, just below rounded numbers—$9.99 or $9,990 are likely price tags—, so as to avoid the evocation of a higher magnitude.”

If you take the step of changing the analogy of ideas to genes (memes) to the analogy of ideas to organisms (ideanisms?) then there is no construction going on (A process that goes beyond Darwinian mechanisms in its explanation) and you instead gain a very simple explanation of what the fitness landscape is: the human mind.

Successful memes explore human cognitive invariants.

The mechanism above can, by itself, explain some social reality aspects being surprisingly robust, popping up across cultures and time. (This somewhat contradicts what I wrote when I said that worldviews were just fashion.) It is not that the ideas are coming back from the dead, but that the human mind has invariants of more and less stability and these invariants allow for natural resurrection biology. (Species die out, and then are selected into existence again because the fitness landscape is very stable in some regards.)

Cognitive invariants as evolutionary basins of attractors are beautiful because they explain how social reality can be properly robust, whilst being nothing-more-than the agreement of several social actors.

Stances are all over the place. This is thus explained: they are explained by exploring some evolutionary basin of attraction, some human cognitive invariants. But I want to focus on something which is as insidious, but more visible.

Magical Thinking

Magical thinking – which totally is a real psychological construct – refers to the attribution of causal relationships between actions and events which cannot be justified by reason and observation.

Supernatural explanations follow from it, including supernatural beings. These are selected in accordance to a particular basin of attraction:  “In principle there should be no limit to the diversity of supernatural beings humans can imagine. However, as Pascal Boyer has argued, only a limited repertoire of such beings is exploited in human religions. Its members—ghosts, gods, ancestor spirits, dragons, and so on—have all in common two features. On the one hand, they each violate some major intuitive expectations about living beings: expectation of mortality, of belonging to one and only one species, of being limited in one’s access to information, and so on. On the other hand, they satisfy all other intuitive expectations and are therefore, in spite of their supernaturalness, rather predictable. Why should this be so? Because being “minimally counterintuitive” makes for “relevant mysteries”  and is a cultural attractor. Imaginary beings that are either less or more counterintuitive than that are forgotten or are transformed in the direction of this attractor.”

The cognitive invariants in place are two opposing forces: (a) counterintuitive enough to be memorable and (b) not so counterintuitive that it is very costly to remember.

Gods are just overblown supernatural being – “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer” said Voltaire.

 

A rough typology of ideas

Note that worldviews suggest a position on everything and are embedded in the culture. They are extremely rarefied and difficult to see from the outside because they are everywhere.

On the other end you have specific thought popping in your head about how you have to buy eggs, really specific, really easy to see into and not get merged into our taken by.

In the middle you have something like “X” thinking (Magical, religious, supernatural, scientific thinking).

These all vary around the dimensions of (a) how rarefied they are, (b) the breadth or scope of their application, and (c) the development level needed to see them.

The third factor is really interesting. You literally need to climb levels in psycho-social development to see the things that you were seeing through previously and the distribution of levels in adulthood in something like a normal distribution focused on the Conscientious stage, there being still at least 4 more possible stages.

This means that worldviews would be me more stable, since you would need to go up more levels to even see them, much less criticise or question them. This is a huge selection effect against worldviews ever being put up for selection, so to speak. Given this, worldviews can replicate easily and be relatively stable over long periods of time because newborns are just born into them.

This explains that the science of the study of worldview is young and inchoate (2) whilst that of studying “X” thinking is not, and that modernism was around for so damn long (still is), likewise with postmodernism.

 

  1. Bolton, D., Dearsley, P., Madronal‐Luque, R., & Baron‐Cohen, S. (2002). Magical thinking in childhood and adolescence: Development and relation to obsessive compulsion. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 20(4), 479-494.
  2. Koltko-Rivera, M. E. (2004). The Psychology of Worldviews. Review of General Psychology, 8(1), 3.

 

 

 

Future:

Not even falsifiable: Worldviews as fashion

~ Silver V ~ 4 Comments

Worldviews

Three seemingly unrelated cases: 1) When Kissinger allegedly asked the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai about the impacts of the French Revolution, he replied it was “too early” to tell; 2) Popper claimed in the Open Society and its Enemies that we are still “living the impact of leaving the closer (tribal) society [of hunter-gatherers into civilisation]”; 3)the feelings expressed here. (The [contemporary] author reads (19th Century) Jules Vernes and  summarizes the experience as such “The perusal of this book left me repeatedly struck not just with a case of -am-not-buying-into-this-improbable-event-in-your-plot, but with actual discomfort”. This discomfort is caused by the perceived imorality or amorality of the authors assumptions.)

These three share some characteristics: They are amusing, and curious; and difficult to engage with. Are these statements right or wrong, true or false? Is it true that is was too early to tell about the French Revolution’s impact? Is it true we are still, as a society, suffering the growing pains from leaving the hunter-gatherer life? Was Jules Vernes wrong in describing gigantic octopi as“monstrosities of nature”?

It almost feels like a category error to apply these terms to these cases.

It seems like a category error to apply these terms because it is: the ideas are very real in a sense, but not pinned down enough for truth/false or right/wrong to even apply. (In contrast “All men are mortal”  seems pinned down enough to be truth-apt and trolley problems are examples of thought experiments that are precise enough that their rightness/wrongness can be talked about.)

Even if, in fact, the statements cited are not pinned down enough to be talked about in those terms they must be important – it seems that people operate from that level, think at that level in everyday discourse.

So the question insinuates itself: what is this level?

I suspect each of those statements to be reflections of worldviews. That is why the first answer became famous: it is very alien to our (Western) worldview to imagine the events of the French Revolution are not settled after 200 years. It is unclear how long it would take to have them be settled, but certainly less than 200 years. The second one is significant in the way of its time largess as well – it makes a claim that says the same about 10,000 years ago. The third one is also a clash of worldviews, but at the level of what is and isn’t right.

A worldview is “(…) a way of describing the universe and life within it, both in terms of what is and what ought to be. A given worldview is a set of beliefs that includes limiting statements and assumptions regarding what exists and what does not (either in actuality, or in principle), what objects or experiences are good or bad, and what objectives, behaviors, and relationships are desirable or undesirable. A worldview defines what can be known or done in the world, and how it can be known or done. In addition to defining what goals can be sought in life, a worldview defines what goals should be pursued. Worldviews include assumptions that may be unproven, and even unprovable, but these assumptions are superordinate, in that they provide the epistemic and ontological foundations for other beliefs within a belief system.” (1)

Zhou’s quote is enticing because of how alien it is: it subtly clashes against the “assumptions that may be unproven, and even unprovable (…) that provide the epistemic and ontological foundations for other beliefs” within our belief system.

It is enticing because it allows us to see into something that our worldview leaves hidden. It suggest something that could never have been considered from the standpoint of the existing worldview because it violates it.

 

Mechanism of selection

Let us assume that the sentences cited do reflect worldviews. Worldviews have unprovable, unfalsifiable assumptions. How would one go about figuring out if it is or is not too early to tell about the effects of the French Revolution? Or whether it is wrong to declare gigantic octopi to be “monstrosities of nature”?

So how do worldviews change? Why is animism not in vogue anymore?

Evolutionary processes

Let us also take evolution as a model. Evolution is a process that changes the characteristics in a population over generations. It does so through three mechanisms: Variation, Selection, and Retention.

Firstly, the elements of the population have to differ in some form. Secondly, there must be some criteria to select some elements over the others, and thirdly, selected elements must reproduce elements that are similar to them. Once these three are in place, evolution by natural selection follows.

 

Science as an evolutionary process

Applying the model above (and falsifiability as the criteria of what is scientific) we can posit that if theories are falsifiable, and selected for surviving falsification attempts then one can expect this mechanism to retain theories that are more encompassing and more precise. (As a virtue of having survived falsification attempts that weeded out less encompassing, less precise theories.)

This is what happens going from Classical mechanics to Modern Physics. The criteria was falsifiability and Classical Mechanics failed to account for very small objects and very high velocities. Modern Physics was developed to account for this, turning Classical Mechanics into a special case of itself.

If worldviews are unfalsifiable, then what are they being selected for? What is originating world view evolution?

 

A brief interlude on how fashion works

Here is a parsimonious explanation of fashion as an instance of a counter-signalling hierarchy by Scott Alexander : “Consider a group of people separated by some ranked attribute. Let’s call it “class”. There are four classes: the upper class, the middle class, the lower class, and, uh, the underclass.

Everyone wants to look like they are a member of a higher class than they actually are. But everyone also wants to avoid getting mistaken for a member of a poorer class. So for example, the middle-class wants to look upper-class, but also wants to make sure no one accidentally mistakes them for lower-class.

But there is a limit both to people’s ambition and to their fear. No one has any hopes of getting mistaken for a class two levels higher than their own: a lower-class person may hope to appear middle-class, but their mannerisms, accent, appearance, peer group, and whatever make it permanently impossible for them to appear upper-class. Likewise, a member of the upper-class may worry about being mistaken for middle-class, but there is no way they will ever get mistaken for lower-class, let alone underclass.

So suppose we start off with a country in which everyone wears identical white togas. One day the upper-class is at one of their fancy upper-class parties, and one of them suggests that they all wear black togas instead, so everyone can recognize them and know that they’re better than everyone else. This idea goes over well, and the upper class starts wearing black.

After a year, the middle class notices what’s going on. They want to pass for upper-class, and they expect to be able to pull it off, so they start wearing black too. The lower- and underclasses have no hope of passing for upper-class, so they don’t bother.

After two years, the lower-class notices the middle-class is mostly wearing black now, and they start wearing black to pass as middle-class. But the upper-class is very upset, because their gambit of wearing black to differentiate themselves from the middle-class has failed – both uppers and middles now wear identical black togas. So they conceive an ingenious plan to switch back to white togas. They don’t worry about being confused with the white-togaed underclass – no one could ever confuse an upper with a lower or under – but they will successfully differentiate themselves from the middles. Now the upper-class and underclass wear white, and the middle and lower classes wear black.”

Fashion as an evolutionary process

Fashion is (in the model above) an example of a counter-signalling hierarchy. Human artifacts (clothing) are being selected to distinguish between classes in the interest of displaying status.

The generalized claim is that humans artifacts (like theories, worldviews, ideas, art, clothing, technology) that do not have a significant selection mechanism (like science has falsifiability) will fall into the domain of a more primal selection mechanism. (Thus there is always a selection mechanism at work by default. Institutions can override a particular selection mechanism.)

These more mundane mechanism involve all the things that humans are selected and select for: resource acquisition, status, protection, and so on.

 

What the model explains

According to this model you would explain several changes in fields which are not aimed anywhere, not better than the previous one in any significant way, but just different and taking it into account. This is the case for Art movements and their evolution, Cultural movements and their evolution (Are “emos” better than “surfers” better than “hipsters”? Is “Cubism” better than “Dadaism”?), worldviews and their evolution (The emerge of postmodernism and of new movements fighting to substitute it, and after that, whichever movement wins out we can expect new fighting for substitution.)

It also explains Kuhn’s description of scientific revolutions (“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”) which, applies beautifully to massive scale memetic changes (end of acceptance slavery, end of communism, generalised contemporary pro-democracy, everyone knowing that Freud and Descartes are wrong about everything without ever having read them.) (2)

Screen Shot 2014-12-02 at 00.51.21

 

  1. Koltko-Rivera, M. E. (2004). The Psychology of Worldviews. Review of General Psychology, 8(1), 3.
  2. Necessary disclaimer: “This historical fact about the origin of anger confuses all too many people.  They say, “Wait, are you saying that when I’m angry, I’m subconsciously trying to have children?  That’s not what I’m thinking after someone punches me in the nose.” No.  No.  No.  NO! Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers.  The cause of an adaptation, the shape of an adaptation, and the consequence of an adaptation, are all separate things.  If you built a toaster, you wouldn’t expect the toaster to reshape itself when you tried to cram in a whole loaf of bread; yes, you intended it to make toast, but that intention is a fact about you, not a fact about the toaster.  The toaster has no sense of its own purpose.”
 
Future
 
  • What are the forces that change the cultural matrix of society? What forms the zeitgeist? Where do the reigning cultural grand narratives, or cultural myths [or ideologies, frames, cultural narratives, the unseen, world views, social imaginary) come from?
  • How do worldviews develop and propagate through society? (People say stuff like “You have your opinion and I have mine, it’s all opinions”, “it’s all relative”, “truth is relative”, etc. These ideas did not originate in them but in postmodernism  How do these ideas propagate?)
  • How does this analysis relate to Chapman’s stances and systems?
  • Identity/need for affiliation as the force behind all shared worldviews.
  • These are probably part of the solution of how to interact with such statements