Edward Humes, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America's Soul (2008)

Deception and religion have been joined at the hip for a very long time, perhaps as long as religion has existed in human culture given that religion has its origins in believing what we can never see or know.  Monkey Girl is Edward Humes' account of the Dover Township, Pennsylvania school board's effort to introduce the subject of intelligent design into the high school science curriculum and the litigation that ensued when parents stepped forward and asked a court to enjoin the school board's effort on the ground that it offended the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  What the 6-week trial in a United States District Court exposed was concerted deceit on the part of groups opposed to the teaching of natural selection  and what Charles Darwin called "descent with modification" in public school curriculum because it offended the biblical stories that lead them to the belief that god (an intelligent designer) created each of the species separately and the view of some that these acts of creation began no more than 10,000 years ago.  Comparable acts of deceit in the commercial world would be called mislabeling or misbranding or fraud.  In court, it is called perjury.

The drive to engage in the acts of deceit documented by Humes begins with the United States Supreme Court's decision in 1987 that the teaching of creationism offended the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and could not be taught in public schools.  If creationism could not be mandated as a subject of instruction in United States public schools these groups began to think about branding creationism as something else, something that sounded like it belonged in the science classroom --- intelligent design.  Their legal strategy, for example, compelled them to abandon the words "god" and "creator" and relabel god an "intelligent designer."  Their legal strategy also compelled them to create a controversy when, at least in the scientific community, no substantial controversy existed:  the existence of an intelligent designer would be deemed a serious scientific question and one that demanded that schools "teach the controversy."  The lingo of creationism and its relationship to the book of Genesis had to be purged if science students had any chance of being taught an alternate explanation of the creation of species alongside natural selection and descent with modification in the classroom.  This was no easy task.  To biblical literalists, it was confusing and did not sit well with the hard core biblical believers who wanted to drive natural selection and "Darwinism" from science class because, in their view, it was atheistic.  But for the advocates of intelligence design, their difficulties extended beyond the religious motivations of the Dover school board.  Not only were the intelligent design advocates ultimately unable to succeed in concealing the religious motivations of the school board, it turns out there was a long and unambiguous record demonstrating that intelligent design had its intellectual seed in creationism.  The very book that the intelligent design advocates wanted the high school students of Dover to have in their classroom, Of Pandas and People, had been drafted prior to the Supreme Court's 1987 decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, and the drafts had used the word creationism.  By the time of publication, after the Supreme Court rendered its decision in Edwards, the word creationism had been deleted everywhere and replaced with the term intelligent design. 

At the heart of the lawsuit, known as Kitzmiller v. Town of Dover, was this question:  was intelligent design science or religion?  For the plaintiffs, intelligent design was on trial; for the defendants and their supporters, traditional science was on trial.  After a six week trial in which the court heard from scientists on both side of the question, the court found that intelligent design was not science; it was religion. 

The scheme to inject intelligent design --- as opposed to creationism --- into the science curriculum begins with a paper developed by a University of California law professor, Phillip Johnson, that came to be known as the "wedge strategy," because it envisioned hammering a "wedge" into the tree of science by criticizing evolutionary theory --- putting science on the defensive and exploiting religious sentiment that was not only skeptical of evolutionary theory, but was essentially ignorant about natural selection and the body of scientific literature that had substantiated Darwin's natural selection model.  The wedge document was developed by Johnson in collaboration with the Discovery Institute, and essentially outlines not a scientific research program, but a public relations strategy to persuade people that a scientific controversy existed and that the public needed to be made aware of the controversy.  The wedge document was never intended to be made public, and it was forthright and honest in expressing the goals behind the wedge strategy, leaving no doubt about its theistic underpinning: 

• "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
• "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings were created by God."
• to initially see, within five years, "intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory" and within 20 years to see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science" and to see "design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life." 
• "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

During the Kitzmiller trial, however, the lawyers for the defendants, like Peter denying Jesus, wanted nothing to do with the wedge document.  They argued that it was a "mere fundraising proposal" of little significance.  The lawyers for the defendants desperately tried to prevent the plaintiffs' witness, Barbara Forrest, who testified not only about the revisions to the Pandas and People book but also about the wedge document, from testifying at all. 

A central part of the Discovery Institute's strategy was to change the ground rules of science so that it not only included the natural, material world, but also the supernatural ethereal world.  The problem with this project is that it is nothing less than the merger of science and religion.  According to the testimony of the plaintiff's expert at the Kitzmiller trial, "Science is the systematic attempt to provide natural explanations for natural phenomena."  The exclusion of the supernatural from science was unavoidable.  A scientific theory is testable, and is capable of being proven false.  The supernatural is not testable.  Judge Jones concluded, "Intelligent design is predicated on supernatural causation. . . . Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science.  These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief."

Numerous posts in this blog raise issues that are relevant to the Kitzmiller case:

Teleology v teleonomy.  (June 12, 2011, May 24, 2010  and March 24, 2010 post).

The human propensity for self-deception and deception.  (February 4, 2012, August 28, 2011, and May 22, 2011 and May 12, 2010 post)

Anthropomorphism, anthropotheism,  and anthropodenial.  (March 20, 2012, June 12, 2011 and June 17, 2010 post).

Dualism and materialism.  ( December 17, 2012, February 27, 2011 and September 27, 2009 post)

At its core, the intelligent design movement, as exposed in the wedge document, is about as un-American as any group can be.  The long-run goal is for design theory to permeate not only religious, cultural, and moral life, but also "political life."  This is so contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, one would think the design movement's adherents were really living in modern Iran or some other theocracy.  Yet what Monkey Girl reveals is that the intelligent design movement has so little respect for the First Amendment, because they believe the government has abandoned religion by recognizing the freedom of atheists, skeptics (agnostics), and pantheists who imagine a universe governed by natural laws (see January 31, 2013 post) and they believe the government has abandoned its moorings as a "Christian nation."  In contrast, Humes closes out Monkey Girl with a quotation from the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, signed by founding father President John Adams:

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the religion, or tranquility of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility, against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the Parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."  (Emphasis added).

Nor should one forget the Jefferson Bible, in which founding father Thomas Jefferson, excised the text pertaining to miracles and other supernatural events. 

I have a proposal that will surely bring the intelligent design movement and creationists running back for the protection of the First Amendment.  Congress should pass a law that requires every religious school class to teach the following every Saturday or Sunday:  "The Book of Genesis is a story.  It was written and later edited by men who could not explain their origins or the origins of the physical universe including other life on earth and life and other material beyond the earth.  It's a wonderful story and it even has meaning, but it is just a story.  Our origins really did not happen they way, Adam and Eve were not real people, and the other stories that purport to be written history of the Hebrews are merely stories as well.  There may be some little historical basis in some of these stories, but they have been gilded, edited, redacted, and revised to fit a collective memory long after the events described in Genesis purportedly took place.  And by the way, children, did you not see that Genesis mentions nothing about the dinosaurs and other animals that lived on earth millions of years ago, whose bones we find in the ground today.  Children, do you not wonder why Genesis does not mention dinosaurs and other animals who no longer exist?  The answer is simple.  The men who wrote the stories in Genesis did not know about these animals.  They were not as knowledgeable as you are today."  Once the law is passed, I am sure there will be a lawsuit.  Maybe the ACLU will be the plaintiff.

In Edwards v. Aguillard, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Antonin Scalia dissented from the majority's decision that struck down Louisiana's statute that called for the "balanced treatment" of "creation science" and "evolution science" in Louisiana schools.  The 7 member majority of the Court authored by Justice Brennan and the concurring opinions of Justice Powell and Justice White found plenty of evidence that creation science lacked a secular purpose and was religiously inspired.  "This is not a hard case," wrote Justice White.  The case came before the Supreme Court based on the trial court's grant of a motion for summary judgment, which meant the trial court found enough undisputed evidence presented by the plaintiff's challenging the Louisiana statute to warrant granting a judgment without a full evidentiary trial.  Justice Scalia professed to take no position on the merits of "creation science," but he felt that Louisiana deserved a full evidentiary trial before an appellate court such as the US Supreme Court decided whether or not there was a valid secular purpose.  One would think, and hope, that Justice Scalia, informed by the full evidentiary record in Kitzmiller, would have recognized as Justice White did in Edwards that "this is not a hard case" had the Kitzmiller case made its way to the Supreme Court for judicial review, and that he would recognize that intelligent design deserved the same fate that creation science received in Edwards. 

John Searle, Making The Social World (2010)

The substance of John Searle's most recent book, Making the Social World, is largely covered by the last chapter of his 2008 selection of essays, Philosophy in a New Century entitled "Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles" (see January 21, 2011 post).  I refer the reader back to this earlier post for Searle's discussion of status functions, deontic powers, and desire-independent reasons for action.  This is a discussion of the language-enabled creation of obligations, permissions, rights, responsibilities, duties, obligations and the like (what Searle calls deontic powers) that Searle tells us are the glue of the human social world and collective action.  I wish to cover two topics in this posting:  first, the importance of language in making a social world, and second, the significance of human imagination in Searle's model of the social world. 

Language is the foundation of all social institutions, says Searle. "We will not understand an essential feature of language if we do not see that it necessarily involves social commitments, and that the necessity of these social commitments derives from the social character of the communication situation, the conventional character of the devices, used, and the intentionality of speaker meaning.  It is this feature that enables language to form the foundation of human society in general."  Language, adds Searle, introduces deontology into social relations and how it creates an institutional reality with a deontic power.  The foundation of Searle's thesis is this:  "If a speaker intentionally conveys information to a hearer using socially accepted conventions for the purpose of producing belief in the hearer about a state of affairs in the world, then the speaker is committed to the truth of his utterance."  There is no way, Searle comments, that if I say to someone publicly, intentionally, explicitly, "There is an animal coming toward us," without being committed to the truth of the propositional content that there is an animal coming toward us.  Both the belief and the statement involve commitments, but the commitment of the statement is much stronger, for if the commitment of the privately held belief turns out to be false, I am free to revise it.  In the case of the statement, however, I am committed to not only to revision in the case of falsehood, but I am also committed to providing reasons for the original statement, I am committed to sincerity in making it, and I am publicly responsible if it turns out to be false.  A speech act is more than just an expression of belief; a speech act is a public performance.

To appreciate the significance that Searle attaches to language in humans, it is important to understand what Searle believes language added to our prelinguistic capabilities and therefore ask:  what are the features that prelinguistic human mentality and language have in common (and therefore what did language contribute over and above our prelinguistic mentality)?  The common features, according to Searle, are these:

• Perception.  These are our sensory capabilities.  Perception and the object perceived are causally self-referential, says Searle:  we experience an object only if the presence of the object caused our sensory experience of the object.
• Beliefs, desires, intending, and emotions such as hopes, fears and the like. These are the capabilities of the mind by which it is directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world.  This is referred to as intentionality (a concept not limited to "intending"). Beliefs, etc. are not causally self-referential.
• Intentional action. This capacity is embraces a causal sequence (intention and action are causally self-referential), assuming that action actually occurs.  There can be a prior intent to act; it can be an intention that is coincident to acting.  All actions require intentions-in-acting, but not all actions require prior intent.
• (At least) short-term memory.  Like intentional action, memory is causally self-referential: we recall something only if we experienced the thing that triggers our present memory of that thing.

Thus, in the cases of perception, memory, and intentional action, there is a match between the mind and the world.  Beliefs, desires, and the like are not necessarily tethered to the world, although they are derivative of perception, memory and intentional action, which are.  Because they are not tethered to the world in the same way, beliefs, desires etc are much more "flexible" in relating to reality.

While denying that he is engaging in speculative evolutionary biology, Searle asks us to imagine hominids with the full range of prelinguistic capabilities just noted, but not having language.  Evolutionary biology has, in fact, established that this scenario likely existed more than 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.  (See January 31, 2013 post) depending on when we determine that language emerged in humans.  What we are capable of achieving with language, says Searle, that we cannot achieve with our prelinguistic consciousness is the ability to manipulate the syntactical elements.  Language consists of sentences composed of syntactical elements that can be manipulated; prelinguistic intentional states are not:  "the dog might think that someone is approaching the door but the dog cannot think the false thought that door is approaching someone."  [This may or may not be true for a dog, but I am skeptical that it is necessarily true for the prelinguistic human --- to be discussed below when I touch on imagination.]  Importantly, speech acts come in five categories:  (i) assertives (representing how things are); (ii) directives (orders, commands); (iii) commissives (promises, pledges); (iv) expressives (apologies, thanks); and (v) declarations.  The first four speech acts have their analogs in intentional states (corresponding to beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions such as fear, hope and the like) and are not causally self-referential.  Declarations are different.  In the case of a declaration, "we make something the fact by declaring it to be the case."   Declarations, on the other hand, have no prelinguistic analog and they are causally self-referential:  the prelinguistic intentional states "cannot create facts in the world by representing those facts as already existing.  This remarkable feat requires language."  This has enormous significance for the construction of a social reality (derived from perception, intentional action, and/or memory).  But through a declaration we have the ability to declare things to be the case that were not necessarily the case prior to the declaration: that I am the shaman of this tribe, I am the leader of this tribe, these five persons comprise our governing council, this piece of paper shall be legal tender for all debts and obligations public or private.  Equally, if not more important for Searle, language creates speaker meaning for those prelinguistic intentional states, and, as noted in the opening paragraph of this post, with respect to those causally self-referential intentional states, language necessarily involves social commitments by declaring what we perceive, intend, or recall to the be the case. And so once we have language, we have a deontology --- the ability to establish duties, obligations, rights and the like that are desire-independent.  With collective acceptance of these duties, obligations, rights and the like, we can have collective intentionality. 

Not everyone concurs with Professor Searle's view on the importance of language.  Frank Hindriks, for example, surmises that collective acceptance and collective intentionality can arise through gesture (including sanctions):

"Consider  Searle’s example of a wall that decays and turns from a physical structure into an institutional boundary (94--‐96).  It is not obvious that any linguistic communication is required in the process.  People can observe each other’s behavior including sanctioning behavior such as frowning when someone crosses the boundary.  At some point it is true that the stones that are left form a boundary, and this fact involves the obligation not to cross it.  The stones form a boundary because the relevant people recognize it as such.  These people believe that it is a boundary, and recognize the deontic powers that come with being a boundary.  In light of this, it seems fair to say that the collective intentional states  that are involved in the constitution of the boundary have the double direction of fit.  Language needs not enter, neither to account for the double direction of fit [causal self-reference] nor to explain the normative nature of this institutional fact.  I am not sure what Searle has in mind when he mentions conventionally encoded commitments, but see no reason to believe that I have left anything out of the picture that essentially involves linguistic conventions.  So it seems that Searle overestimates the role language plays in institutions when he claims language is constitutive of institutions."

As a matter of anthropology and evolutionary biology, Hindriks may be closer to the mark as Chris Boehm's Moral Origins indicates. (See November 21, 2012 post).  Searle admits that cooperation among hominids is a characteristic of pre-linguistic humans.  But Boehm's thesis is that forms of human organization (egalitarian in nature) emerged as early as 150,000 to 200,000 years ago (if not earlier in other homo species), primarily through sanctioning behavior (subtle or lethal), well before language emerged 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.  It may very well be true that the kind of social institutions created by humans for the first time 10,000-35,000 years ago could not have occurred without language, but if Hindriks is correct, as some evidence suggests, then it means that humans were capable of non-linguistic declarations and that "hearer meaning" and collective acceptance in the pre-linguistic world was secured through a punch in the face.  And perhaps by virtue of mirror neurons.  (See October 25, 2011 and September 18, 2009 posts). 

This brings me to the more disappointing accounting in Searle's account of the creation of a social reality, although admittedly he does not ignore the subject.  Professor Searle is certainly correct when he says that what typically gets communicated in speech acts  are intentional states representing the world.  A previous post noted the research that truth telling is the default position of the human brain (see February 4, 2012 post) and this seems to make common sense as well.  But the human capacity to engage in both deception and self-deception cannot be overlooked.  (See February 4, 2012 and June 12, 2011 and May 22, 2011 posts).  This is missing from Searle's analysis, although he expressly acknowledges that the "one faculty that is left out of [his listing of intentional states], because it does not have a direction of fit, is imagination. . . unlike belief, which has the downward direction of fit, or desire, which has the upward direction of fit, my imagining something commits me neither to believing that what I imagine is the case, nor to the wanting it to be the case.  Sometimes one fantasizes what one would like to occur, but it is not an essential feature of fantasy or imagination that they are forms of desire.  One can fantasize what one fears or hates, as well as what one believes might happen, and indeed what one believes could not possibly happen.  There is no responsibility for fitting with imagination.  Another feature peculiar to imaging is that it is, or can be, free voluntary action. . . Imagination will have a role in our account of social ontology, because the creation of a reality that exists only because we think it exists requires a certain level of imagination."  The mistake here, it seems to me, is  a virtual assumption that the truth-telling default position of the human brain is the only position.  We know that is not the case.  We lie and deceive more frequently than we care to admit, and, importantly for this discussion, we do occasionally engage in acts of deception and make our imagination fit the world by declaring it to be the case even though that is inconsistent with the objective facts.  The Catholic Church's denial of the Copernican System is an obvious example.  (See  December 17, 2012 and December 5, 2012 post). 

This is why, in discussing Searle's example of the dog who "cannot think the false thought that door is approaching someone" I questioned whether this was necessarily true for prelinguistic humans.  If a prelinguistic human believed that the earth circles the sun, it is equally possible that the prelinguistic human could have held the false thought that the sun circles the earth.  There is no apparent reason why prelinguistic human mental states are not capable of manipulation on account of imagination. Human social reality can be constructed on the basis of false beliefs and by declaring that to be the case, and Searle admits that this can be the case as when "a community believes that someone has divine powers," where the belief goes beyond the fact.  He admits that "a whole system of status functions may be based on false beliefs," but he says that from the perspective of institutional analysis, it does not matter whether the beliefs are true or false; it only matters whether the people do in fact collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions.  OK.  So we create a "social" reality that is not made of the same the brute physical facts made of "mindless, meaningless, physical particles."  I can accept that, but it seems to contradict the purpose of this book which is "not to allow ourselves to postulate two worlds or three worlds or anything of the sort.  Our task is to give an account of how we live in exactly one world, and how all these different phenomena, from quarks and gravitational attraction to cocktail parties and governments are part of that one world."

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools (2011)

The subtitle of Robert Trivers' tome to his nearly lifelong obsession with deceit is The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Here is the "logic":

1) Deception is widespread across nature. We are most familiar with this fact in the context of camouflage. Evolution has favored genetic characteristics that conceal a species from its predators. This is not deception in the sense of an intentional or purposeful mental act, but it is nevertheless deception. Trivers also documents deceptive behavioral acts in the non-human animal kingdom that are designed to enhance reproductive success, but again these are typically not intentional or purposeful mental acts, but genetically-driven hardwired behavior in the species. Cognitive-based acts of deception in the non-human primate community appear to occur.

2) Deception is therefore an adaptive strategy that favors survival and reproductive success and must be understood in that light.

3) Deception is widespread in the human species. Trivers cites examples of deception in courtship that appear to be related to reproductive success. There are examples of deception that are related to survival. The Folly of Fools is a catalogue of the examples and means by which humans deceive other humans, a subject that a prior posting in Shakespeare's King Lear addressed (see August 28, 2011 post). And while deceit is a frequent, clever device in Shakespeare's works, deceit has been a feature of the literature of tragedy and comedy since ancient times. False identity is a frequent dramatic device in comedies. The big difference, however, in acts of deception by humans and deception in other species is that human deception is largely, but not entirely a cognitive phenomenon.

This brings us to the larger topic of Trivers' book: self-deception in human life. The question he poses from the outset of this book is this: our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner. Why then, do we act to "destroy" or depreciate the quality of that information through self-deception? Intuitively, one would think that gathering, correctly interpreting and using accurate, detailed information would the be the successful evolutionary adaptive strategy; however, the extensive catalog of the ways in which humans deceive themselves, and The Folly of Fools overwhelms its readers with examples that make you feel that that is all that we do (a point I will come back to later), suggests, by its prevalence, that self-deception is the successful evolutionary strategy. Trivers' explanation: self-deception is essential to humans' ability to practice deception --- "we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others." Trivers' lament is that if humanity understood better that the reinforcing cycle of self-deception and deception we practice frequently has such disastrous consequences for humans --- he discusses aviation and space disasters, war and other conflicts, and even professional disasters in the social sciences --- we would be better at fighting self-deception and reap benefits, both individual and social that we are foregoing by succumbing too easily to deceit.

Readers who are willing to cast aside his and her various biases --- cultural and religious, personal including emotional --- and mentally transport themselves to a state that one of my college professors, John Harsanyi, and later John Rawls called "the veil of ignorance" (see May 12, 2010 post and January 11, 2011 post) will easily accept that the litany of ways Trivers describes that we deceive ourselves are true. The telling of false historical narratives begins with self-deception. This includes self-deception that is deployed for purposes of in-group-integration, nation-building and the construction of religion and religious institutions. Importantly, self-deception is aimed at inflating the self (ego), or, correlatively, derogating others, inducing a sense of empowerment, moral superiority, and control. These examples occur at the level of individuals, however they are deployed at the group level and have their group-level "us versus them" correlates: inflating the family, the community, the corporation, the tribe, the nation, the religion, the race, the species, etc. and derogating other families, communities, corporations, tribes, nations, religions, races and species.

Where The Folly of Fools falls flat is the absence of any significant discussion of how self-deception actually occurs. The fact of self-deception is well-documented by Trivers, but the mechanism is not. There is certainly a larger story here, and some of the prior postings on this blog cover some of the elements: bias, imagination, and memory. The term "bias" appears many times in this book, but it is nowhere systematically explored as it is in Robert Shermer's The Believing Brain (see June 12, 2011 post). Trivers' tome would benefit from inclusion, even if only by reference, of a discussion of the literature of bias. It is instructive for how false historical narratives, political beliefs, religious beliefs, and even our assumptions about the behavior of others are formed. Underlying the formation of bias is how the mind really works --- something we know a lot about now although our knowledge is by no means complete either. The idea of heuristics, as described by Shermer (again, see June 12, 2011 post), the brain's capacity to solve problems through intuition, trial and error, rules of thumb, or other informal shortcuts, when there is no formal means for solving the problem is significant in the formation of beliefs. If Shermer is right that evolution has brought us to form beliefs first and only later do we try to inform our beliefs with facts, then Trivers' starting point to his thesis (stated above) --- that our sensory and neurological systems are devoted to gathering information about our physical well-being and the environment around us in an accurate and detailed manner --- is misplaced, or is at least missing an important aspect of how our mind works, that we do not always take in "accurate and detailed" information.

Other postings on this blog have discussed the fact that areas of our brain are devoted in part to trying to explain the information that our sensory organs have delivered to the brain. (See e.g. May 22, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post). In other posts I have referred to this as our "storytelling" capability, but it includes our capacity for abstraction and imagination and analysis. Imagination is deployed for a variety of mental acts: to explain the physical world that is either to large or too small for us to see (see July 30, 2011 post and November 6, 2011 post); to explain history after rigorous research supported by contemporaneous documentation (see January 14, 2012 post, December 16, 2010 post and March 24, 2010 post); to create pure fantasy (see e.g., June 28, 2011 post and March 28, 2010 post); and to merge both fantasy and history in a retelling that is is either fiction or historical fiction (see July 17, 2011 post and November 16, 2011 post). Douglas Hofstadter, whom I mentioned in the previous post, had this to say in Godel, Escher, Bach:

"Not all descriptions of a person need to be attached to some central symbol for that person, which stores that person's name. Descriptions can be manufactured and manipulated in themselves. We can invent non-existent people by making descriptions of them; we can merge two descriptions when we find they represent a single entity; we can split one description into two when we find it represents two things, not one --- and soon. This 'calculus of descriptions' is at the heart of thinking. It is said to be intensional and not extensional, which means we can 'float' without being anchored down to specific objects. The intensionality of thought is connected to its flexibility; it gives us the ability to imagine hypothetical worlds, to amalgamate different descriptions or chop one description into separate pieces, and so on. Fantasy and fact intermingle very closely in our minds and this is because thinking involves the manufacture and manipulation of complex descriptions."

This is what our mind does, and self-deception is one potential outcome of our cognitive processes. Sometimes that self-deception is accidental, sometimes it is unknowing, and sometimes it is intentional. As Robert Shermer and others have documented, the deception can begin at a very early age before we are of a maturity to act against it and by the time we reach an appropriate age to question what we believe, we are too invested in or it is too costly to rebut engrained beliefs. At this point, it is a matter of memory and human memory is not limited to "accurate and detailed information." (See September 20, 2011 post). The brain has ways of categorizing information in less than a detailed way.

It is possible to read The Folly of Fools and conclude that humans suffer from a persistent state of delusion. If that is the true, the skepticism that Enlightenment philosophers confronted (see February 27, 2011 post) may well still be warranted, and perhaps John Searle's view of the 21st century that the era of skepticism was long past (see January 21, 2011 post) is perhaps unwarranted. I don't think so. In Mapping the Mind (see November 6, 2011 post), Rita Carter cites research indicating that truth telling appears to be the default position of the human brain, and that deception involves extra cognitive effort requiring more energy. The question of whether humans are more inclined to tell the truth or to self-delude themselves is an unanswered question in my view, but I am not inclined to the view that our default state is self-deception. In the prior post discussing Carter's observation, I noted she had not discussed or accounted for the mental short-cuts we often engage in (heuristics) that may rely on certain biases in our perception or understanding of things observed. Those short-cuts may circumvent the extra cognitive effort that self-deception requires.

Trivers seems to think that our difficulty in addressing reality is that neurophysiological system (and hence our conscious experience) is always a fraction of a second behind the actual sensory experience. "Regarding one's personal life, the problem with learning from living is that living is like riding a train while facing backward. That is, we see reality only after it has passed us by. Neurophysiologists have shown that this is literally true. We see (consciously) incoming information as well as our internal intention to act, well after the fact. It seems as if it is difficult to learn after the fact what to predict ahead of the fact; thus our ability to see the future, even that of our own behavior, is often very limited." It is true, as Trivers says, that the left side of our brain devoted to explaining what it is we are experiencing follows by milliseconds the actual sensory experience of what is actually happening to us. But we are talking milliseconds. The fact of the matter is that humans do have the ability to see the future coming (sometimes imperfectly, but sometimes with greater prescience than we realize). As we live our lives, we are, during our waking hours, facing forward. One of the most amazing capacities of the human mind, and perhaps some other species as well, but certainly in humans is that it plays what Antonio Damasio referred to as the "movie within a movie," and we are able mentally visualize and anticipate what is about to happen. Mirror neurons may trigger something as we watch another person that enable us to anticipate what is going to happen to someone else. So we are not living our lives facing backward. Perhaps it is when we are asleep, as Rita Carter noted (see November 6, 2011 post), and our mind is busy building memories, that we are looking backwards.