Ambigamy

Ego: Distinguishing between self-assertive and self-centered

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:16:12 +0000

Eckart Tolle says "Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind."

That's a bold assertion. Maybe it's true but it is worth examining if it wouldn't be egotistical of me to do so. It raises questions like how we come by this dysfunction and insanity? If it's that bad why does it persist? And most importantly how do I know when a statement like Tolle's is a responsibly reasoned assertion and when it’s just an ego talking?

In fact, how do we ever know whether a behavior is responsibly chosen or merely self-serving and egotistical? When is someone’s choice to be interpreted as evidence of careful discernment, and when is it shortsighted inconsiderate and irresponsible?
For most of us, the intuitive answer is “I don’t know how to define the difference, but I know it when I see it.”

In other words, use your intuition.

That’s fine except when intuitions disagree which happens a lot. In most conflicts one party or both intuit that they’re being careful and discerning and that the other party is being shortsighted inconsiderate, and irresponsible. When intuitions deadlock is there any greater source of accuracy about who is being egotistical and who is being clear-headed?

Starting with the Enlightenment and growing through existentialism and postmodernism it has become increasingly difficult to believe that there is a great judge or absolute source of truth to which we can compare intuitions to see which is better. As a result, dueling intuitions escalate, each asserting their intuitions about why their intuitions are more accurate.

Of course, there are plenty of people who will say that there is a great judge or absolute source of truth to which one can compare intuitions. But when you ask them how they know this, again it is based on their intuitions.

When you make a point that someone else discounts as just your dysfunctional ego talking, you’ll be tempted to reassert your point. If you do reassert, it can either be interpreted as you standing strong in your responsible convictions or simply as you desperately doubling down on an egotistical gamble, and there’s no absolute way to know which description best applies to your situation.

Ego as self-assertion and ego as self-centered are not distinguishable in any objective way.

Ego is a contranym, a word which means two opposite things. I love a good contranym. For fun here are a few others:

Custom means conventional or unique.
Disposed means removed or available.
Dust means to remove dust or apply dust.
Grade means an incline or to remove incline by leveling.
Handicap means an advantage in sports or a disability.
Temper means to soften or strengthen.

Ego has come to mean either self or selfishness. It’s either the natural and useful power of self-assertion, or the toxicity of self-importance. It’s self-awareness or self-centeredness. One word; two opposite meanings.

I’m sure Tolle is referring to the negative version of the ego, however I find him especially oblivious to the importance of distinguishing good from bad ego. He is not humbled by the challenge of trying to figure out where you’d draw the line. He gives examples in which self-assertions turn out good and bad but at best these define by outcomes, and since outcomes haven’t come out yet, you can’t use them as a way of distinguishing in real time. As a result, his arguments become circular: “Don’t assert the part of self that makes bad things happen because that makes bad things happen.” I agree with him. I just don’t think it amounts to much insight or information. It is consistent with a truth I boldly (or egotistically) hold dear: Never do today what proved harmful tomorrow. Actually ironically--I mean that ironically because what proved harmful tomorrow can’t be used to evaluate something today.

And if his position is not merely circular it’s supremely egotistical, amounting to the declaration that everyone should assert the part of the self that he personally predicts will make good things happen. All other parts of the self are dysfunctional and insane.

Without being careful to offer a clear way to differentiate in real time between self-aggrandizing ego and the natural, useful, and necessary kind of ego, he invites the worse kind of egotistical abuse. Armed with Tolle, any time you are confronted by an intuition different from your own, say its just someone's dysfunctional and insane ego talking and you’re off the hook. I’m not sure how that differs in method from the methods employed by the worst tyrants in history. But that might just be my ego talking.

"Everything happens for a reason": Simple phrase opens worm-can of wonder

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:31:28 +0000

It sounds so true. People seem to take such comfort from that phrase's wisdom. There's something proudly accepting and resolved in their tone when they declare it, as though they're sharing a hard-earned profound lesson.

What it means though is very much up in the air. And therein lies a tale of our era's confusion regarding causality, or what we mean by "a reason."

Here then is brief history of the confusion.

Aristotle, using house-building as an example developed what he thought was a comprehensive list of the kinds of reasons why anything happens:

Material cause (what a house is made of)
Formal cause (the blueprint or plan for putting the materials together)
Efficient cause (the nail-banging done by the carpenter; the "this-hits-that" kind of cause we think of as cause and effect)
Final cause (the purpose or goal for building the house)

For over a thousand years following Aristotle, people focused primarily on final and efficient cause, thinking everything had its purpose, but also accumulating practical intelligence about the "this-hits-that" of efficient cause. In a way, nothing has changed. We still rely mostly on these two kinds of causal explanations. Both are implied by "everything happens for a reason." Do things happen today so as to achieve some later purpose? That's what final cause suggests. Or do things happen today because they are the consequent effect of earlier causes. If so, "a reason" is an appeal to efficient cause.

Think about the two ways you can answer a "Why?" question. Why are the birds flying South? To stay warm in the coming winter is a final cause answer. Because their instincts generated biochemical reactions that switch on migration behavior is an efficient cause answer.

In the West throughout the early middle ages final causes as understood by the Catholic Church were what really mattered. God had purposes and put them into every living and non-living thing. You could explain how anything behaved simply by saying that it was behaving as God intended it to behave.

In the Islamic East, God's purposes--his final causes--were also very important, but Muslims saw no incompatibility in actively investigating efficient cause too. The Muslims were scientists long before science took off in the West.

Then the eleventh century Al Ghazali, an important Islamic philosopher pointed out that actually, final and efficient cause were fundamentally incompatible. Either God's purposes (final causes) are inviolable, or nature's laws (efficient cause) are inviolable. If there's any difference between God's final purposes and nature's efficient laws--for example if God can intervene and miraculously break nature's laws--then they can't both be inviolable.One must ultimately trump the other.

In response, the Islamic East decided God and his purposes trumped efficient cause. Islam backed off of science. In the West, within a few hundred years we took the opposite path, deciding that final cause was not even a rational concept (How can the future cause the present? That would be some inexplicable "backward causality.") Efficient cause became the one true kind of cause. That's why Western science attempts to explain everything in terms of the "this-hits-that," of efficient causes. To most scientists today, there's no final cause or purposes at all. Everything can and must be explained exclusively in terms of efficient cause's billiard ball like "this-hits-that" behavior.

So what do we mean when we say "everything happens for a reason"? Do we mean we mean efficient or final cause?

If we mean there's an efficient cause reason for everything, then all the saying means is that every behavior is a consequence of actions that preceded it. It's like saying "cause and effect rules."

That doesn't seem very profound.

If we mean everything happens for a final cause reason, then every behavior serves some objective, goal or purpose. That's more profound perhaps but it opens a worm-can of wonder. Good purposes? Bad purposes? Whose purposes? And what are you supposed to do about it since your behavior too, whatever it may be, happens for a reason.

Say "everything happens for a reason," and people nod knowingly even though some take it to mean everything happens because it was efficiently caused, and others take it to mean everything serves a purpose. Maybe we prefer to keep the concept ambiguous. It makes for polite agreement even if it hides a major disagreement.

Whether reason is taken to mean final or efficient cause, the psychological effect of saying "Everything happens for a reason" is the same. At the emotional level it means surrender, relax, it's beyond your control. Accept things as they are because they happen for a reason.

It's natural that we would collect and share sayings that mean surrender. There are others: "It's God's will," for example--that's definitely an appeal to a final cause. Or how about "Shit happens"? That's definitely an appeal to efficient cause. Some ways to say "surrender" are appeals to final causes or higher purposes; some to efficient causes or natural laws, and some are ambiguous. "It's Karma" can mean that a particular behavior is rewarded or punished depending on its contribution higher purpose and final cause. Or it can simply mean that a particular behavior is the cause and effect consequence of what preceded it.

People may be confused about what's meant by "everything happens for a reason," but so are scientists. Scientist are committed to the West's elimination of final cause in explanations. But of course they're also people. So even though they want to explain everything in terms of efficient cause, they slip and talk about why things are useful, for example how a body part functions serve an organism's purposes.

Researchers working on the emergence of purpose don't see this slipping into final-cause talk as slipping at all, but rather as evidence that we've got more thinking to do about reasons. Ever since Al Ghazali noticed that you can't have it both ways, we've tried to clarify what is meant by "cause" or "reason" by eliminating one kind of cause or the other. The Islamic East chose God's final cause; the scientific West chose nature's efficient cause. And for a while that was fine. Even more than fine in the West because ignoring final cause allowed us to figure out a lot about efficient cause. We've made so much progress in figuring out nature's "this-hits-that" laws of efficient cause that most scientists think it's only a matter of time before we explain everything in efficient causal terms. But emergence scientists say no, we're coming up to a hard limit. We're beginning to fake it, pretending, for example that your behavior is just efficient cause when really, for humans and indeed all living things, final cause is real. Your purposes change your behavior. Your behavior can't be explained by efficient cause alone.

Not all behavior requires a final cause explanation, but some does, and that, according to emergentists, must be explained. Despite Al Ghazali's either/or framing, we're going to have to be able to have it both ways. The universe at its origins really does seem to operating on efficient cause alone. But living things nonetheless present behavior that can't be explained without reference to purposes. In other words, purpose (final cause) is real even if it doesn't serve a grand purpose.

If you like to have interesting conversations and debates, next time you hear someone say "Everything happens for a purpose," ask them what they mean. By "reason" do they mean because something caused it (efficient cause) or do they mean that it is serving some future goal (final cause)? And if they mean everything serves some higher purpose, is it necessarily a good one? Or do they mean that things happen for good and bad reasons?

The reason I bring this all up is that it serves a higher purpose of mine. In a coming article I'll explain how emergentists, rethinking another of Aristotle's causes, formal cause, begin to explain how you get final cause out of efficient cause. In other words how final cause could emerge from efficient cause.

Getting Smugged: A common crime against your sanity

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:28:36 +0000

You know the feeling, maybe from an infuriating debate with a self-satisfied, complacent, and condescending bureaucrat. Your temperature is rising. His is not. He finds it very amusing to see you getting so worked up. He admires his patience with you.

You asked nicely at first. He was offhandedly dismissive. Frustrated, you tried again, maybe not as nicely. That got his attention, but not to your request to which his answer is still an offhand no. Rather, to your bad attitude.

A few recent encounters like this, not with bureaucrats but with friends, acquaintances and colleagues made me want to name it: Getting smugged. It's when a debate partner changes the subject of debate from content to your attitude problem in such a way that it makes your attitude increasingly divergent from his, thereby affirming that your attitude is really the problem. So long as the smugger can maintain the trappings of a good attitude--a nice patient sounding voice, even with shades of smug condescension, he can maintain the high moral ground and authority. Your attitude will go from good, to bad, to worse.

Of course, sometimes your attitude really is the problem. It is possible to ask for something so aggressively that it can't be granted without, in effect surrendering to a bully. Because attitude can be a real problem, it creates an opening for smugging. In other words since monitoring for bulling is important, it is also possible to bully by means of monitoring. There's an opening for smuggers, gentle-sounding bullies who self-servingly cultivate hypersensitivity to your attitude, and will turn the focus of their attention to it as a way of not having to deal with content:

Ann: Where were you last night? Why did you come back so late smelling of perfume?
Bob: My, aren't you being aggressive. What's with your attitude, dear?
Ann: I'm asking you about last night. Where were you?
Bob: What is this an interrogation? Are you the gestapo? Geez, get a grip woman.
Ann: I'm not being aggressive dammit. I'm asking a simple and reasonable question.
Bob: Well I'm not answering as long as you're going to have a bad attitude about it.
Ann: WHERE WERE YOU?
Bob: Aw come on sweetheart I'm not yelling and you are. Don't you think that says something about who is out of line here?

A recurrent topic in these articles is what we systems theorists call non-linear dynamics, basically how certain patterns cause accelerating escalations. Escalation happens through compounding, just like the compounding interest whereby the rich get non-linearly richer. Non-linearity occurs when the product of a process gets folded back into the process making the process more productive.

Or counter-productive, depending on what you like and don't like. Consider this compounding effect:

Ann: I don't think I did anything wrong.
Bob: Oh, you're just being defensive.
Ann: I don't think so.
Bob: See you're even defensive about being defensive.
Ann: I swear I'm not!
Bob: Wow, I had no idea it was that bad. You're even defensive about being defensive about being defensive.
Ann: I AM NOT!

With both of these examples, the product of each exchange (increased aggressiveness; increased defensiveness) feeds back into the process to start the next exchange. (accusations of same)

I call such exchanges Tar Babies in honor of the ever-stickier trap set by Brer Fox for Brer Rabbit in the Uncle Remus story. Brer fox crafted a doll made from tar. Brer rabbit tried to strike up a conversation with it and got angry when it didn't respond. He hit the tar baby and his hand got stuck in it. That made him madder so he escalated, hitting with the other hand. That hand got stuck too, so he kicked the tar baby too. Soon he was all stuck, trapped as is Ann in both examples above. Every response Ann gives strengthens Bob's smug case.

In conversation, there are lots of these tar babies. For potential smuggers, they are inviting opportunities. Here are a few classics:

Your ego is getting in the way and if you say it isn't, that's your ego talking.

You're getting defensive and if you say you aren't you're just being more defensive.

You're getting aggressive and if you argue you aren't that's further evidence than you're getting aggressive.

We're cracking down on communists and if you object to how we do it, that must mean your a communist.

Only believers go to heaven and if you doubt it, you're going to hell.

We on the Right are pure, unselfish, only on a mission to save our country from the new Hitler and his socialism, and if you doubt us, you're clearly impure, selfish, and out to destroy our country.

People should always be kind and nice and if you raise any doubts about this, you're not being kind and nice.

I'm arguing that there's a transcendent state and if you argue that there isn't, I'll remind you that there's no arguing about it because it's transcendent.

People who get emotionally charged about a topic are invariably projecting, and if my saying that annoys you, you're clearly projecting.

A few Buddhists have used the last three with me lately. When I raised questions about the core assumptions they made, they smiled at me beatifically and said "Yes a lot of people think that." They left out the word "lost" before "people" but I heard it in there.

That's what I mean by getting smugged. And what I want to call attention to is that the smugging dynamic is the same regardless of the school of thought, or the moral principle behind it.

Buddh's do it, Holy See's do it, uneducated anti-commies do it.

Let's not do it.

I don't doubt that I do it too, and saying that doesn't give me permission to do it anyway because at least I'm honest about it. No, I hate being smugged and so I better make sure I don't smug anyone else either.

To name it is to tame it. If I've got a name for it and a clear definition of it, I'm more likely to spot it when others do it to me or when I do it to them. And by having a definition for it I don't mean having one example of the people who annoy me doing it. I can't say smugging is what Right wingers do. If I define it that way, I'll only notice when the people who annoy me do it. I need a content-neutral definition that would encompass when I do it too. Or else I'll simply ignore the ways I do it.

So here are my definitions:

Smugging: In debate, employing a Tar Baby to change the subject from substance to your opponent's bad attitude.

Getting smugged: Being subjected to a smugging.

Oh, and not just a name and definition, a limerick too.

As the self-proclaimed spokesman for virtue,
I must calmly inform and alert you
I mean no assault
But our conflict's your fault
There's no way my intention's to hurt you.

And a caveat: Sometimes it is totally appropriate to change the subject from substance to your opponent's bad attitude. Doing so is not always an evasive technique.

But that's how it is with all lies, tricks, manipulations, and evasions. They would never gain credibility if they weren't situated right next to very credible honorable and appropriate behavior. If lies weren't right next to truths, they would have no power to deceive.

So how can you tell when a behavior is appropriate and when it's evasive? It's hard. One rule is, if you think every time you do it it's appropriate and every time they do it, it's evasive, you're probably not drawing the line fairly. I mean that sounds a little smug.

Lazy Gene theory: A whole new take on self-confidence, love, addiction and co-dependence

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:46:41 +0000

Evolutionary psychology generally focuses on the ways in which life's age old pursuit of biological reproductive success shapes our mind's activities. Evolution and behavior are related in another way as well. Evolutionary epistemologists like me are interested in how the minds activities are evolution by other means. We compare and contrast the mind's trial and error processes with mother nature's. Today I want to give you an example of our work that provides insight into such hot personal topics as self-confidence, love, addiction, and co-dependence.

The first two of these, self-confidence and love sound like good things, and the last two sound like bad ones. Evolutionary epistemologists have to strip away those positive and negative connotations to look more neutrally at underlying processes or dynamics. Like evolutionists or indeed scientists in general, we set aside moral questions long enough to understand how something comes about.

One effective way to neutralize the moral questions is to find counter-examples. Here that would mean cases where self-confidence and love are bad, and addiction and co-dependence are good. That's not hard to do. Self-confidence can make one over-confident in a bad idea. One can love terrible people and things. One can be addicted to wonderfully productive activities (I'm addicted to blogging here, in case you haven't noticed. I like this addiction--it keeps me writing). Co-dependence--dependence on someone who is reciprocally dependent on you--is not always awful. It's also what makes partnerships, communities, societies and indeed the world go round.

Let's leave self-confidence until the end to talk about love, addiction and co-dependence. Connotations aside, they have a lot in common. Here's a biological example to illustrate a commonality.

We need to eat Vitamin C. Other mammals don't. You don't have to give your cat or dog orange juice, do you? What's up with that?

Other mammals produce their own Vitamin C. Geneticists have identified genes that are responsible for this ability. We have the genes too but in us they're damaged beyond functionality. Geneticists are confident we too used to grow our own Vitamin C but now we can't. What happened?

About 35 million years ago our ancestors found their way into trees where fruit was abundant. They ate the fruit for the calories but in the process got the vitamin C. What the genes had provided the environment started providing also. With this new reliable external source, our ancestors had two sources of Vitamin C.

You've probably heard of selfish gene theory. This is lazy gene theory. If a gene has no effect on survival, then the organisms with it will survive even if the gene mutates. And genes do mutate as they pass from generation to generation. That's what happened to our Vitamin C genes. Once fruit was available, the genes had no effect on survival. They just accumulated errors until they didn't work.

It's more sloppy than lazy, but if we are to anthropomorphize it's fine to imagine genes as not bothering to show up for work when their environment has the job covered.

And now we're addicted to this external source of C. We love it, meaning we'll go out of our way to get external Vitamin C. Our dependency on it constrains and shapes our behavior. Fruit loves us too. Not emotionally of course, but in the sense that fruits' dissemination and survival depends upon it being eaten by us. We facilitate seed distribution; it facilitates the prevention of scurvy. You could say we are addicted to each other, or co-dependent.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know. That's not the point here though I will say I do like a good grapefruit. I bring up Vitamin C to illustrate a general pattern in how life accumulates associations and partnerships, addictions, love relationships and co-dependencies. Co-dependency may be the most descriptive of these. Two systems--in my example, primates and fruit--come to depend upon each other for their respective survival.

A grapefruit addiction is safer than a morphine addiction, but the processes by which they come about have a lot in common. Though our addiction to external vitamin C evolved over generations and a morphine addiction evolves in one lifetime, they both evolve because an external source of something becomes available. Use it or lose it--since the internal source is therefore no longer necessary it disappears. When morphine is reliably available, the body down-regulates the production of endorphins (endo- meaning internal, so internal morphine). When fresh fruit is available, the genome stops producing functioning genes for vitamin C endo-synthesis. Same difference.

And such differences propagate other differences. The morphine addict starts stealing money to support his habit, his dependency on an external source. Primates gain color vision to support their habit, their dependency on an external source. Color vision enabled our ancestors to distinguish between ripe and unripe fruit.

OK, now a quick parallel to the dynamics of self-confidence. in my last article I discussed the ways in which self-confidence plummets when you lose your job, a partner, or when otherwise the crowd that used to populate your day thins or disappears. Yes, your confidence drops if you're rejected, but it's not just that. We become dependent on the people around us to remind us of our focus--what we're are and are not doing. If they're not around it's easy to lose focus. When they are around our own self-confidence and self-directedness tends to atrophy a bit.

Just as the self-starter nature of Vitamin C production atrophies over generations in the presence of fruit, or the self-starter nature of endophine production can atrophy in the presence of morphine, so too can the self-starter nature of self-confidence atrophy in the presence of lots of social affirmation.

So what happens when we cold turkey? Unlike the vitamin C gene which will never kick back into production should I lose my grapefruit connection, one's autogenerated self-confidence can kick back in. It may take a while. It takes the body up to six months to get back into full production of endorphine if one cold turkeys on morphine. And becoming a self-starter after you've lost your job could take that long for some of us too.

One last connection: Are people more independent these days than in past generations? Most of us intuit that we are. We think of ourselves as much more free, but a lot of that is a product of how reliably our dependence on our environment is satisfied. Lose your job, lose your Internet service, gas stations, police and fire department, grocery stores, cell phone networks, the cold turkey would be intense. We're more in love with, addicted to and co-dependent on external sources than ever. Good thing to keep in mind in this season of thanks giving.

Self-confidence: Less self-generated than you notice until you're unemployed

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:35:33 +0000

Unemployment has reached its highest level in 26 years. If you're un-, or under-employed this one's for you. It's for you too if your children recently moved out, if you just quit a club or ended a friendship or partnership. Really, its for anyone whose life somehow became less populated recently.

Until a few months ago I taught thirty hours a week. That meant I had a lot of eyes on me, eyes expecting me to be and do certain things. It was easy to play teacher. I'd wake up around 7:00am maybe slightly disoriented. Coffee would open my eyes and then students would fill them with faces looking back at me expecting me to be teacher-like.

At some point in my six years teaching, I noticed that even a week's vacation would make me a little fuzzy about teaching. Not a lot--I still knew enough to say with confidence that I was a teacher. But the first day back, on my bikeride to school, I'd notice a touch of Impostor Syndrome. I would be slightly less confident in my ability to teach. And then, popping back into the classroom and seeing the expectant students would bring it all back. My sense of self was in large part a function of my social environment.

We think of confidence and focus as something self-generated. We hardly recognize how much their strength depends on how our environment supports, subsidizes or reinforces them. The company we keep provides structural supports that bolster our sense of who we are and what we're for. Self-confidence is largely a habit of reciprocation between you and the people who expect things of you.

It's not hard to stay on track and confident you can do something if day after day people expect it of you. If the company disappears, those structural supports are pulled out, and you tend to feel your sense of self start to melt, seep and leak. Sure, with the loss of a job or friends, there's sadness and grief at the loss. But it's not just that. In the days and months that follow, you wake up to fewer people expecting anything from you and therefore you're likely to have less clarity, focus and direction. You may miss your old job less than you miss your stable sense of self.

We become dependent upon our environment in ways we are unlikely to notice unless our environment changes. If you're unemployed, you may find yourself trying to replace the affirmation you lost in a variety of ways. A new job, sure, but also more face book, more dating, more time down at the bar or church, or more self-generated confidence.

Here's where ego come in. In lulls, when the world isn't expecting much from me, and yet I want to stay productive, I have to narrate my life more, reminding myself who I am and what I'm for. I actually talk to myself. I use informal affirmations, telling myself how it's going to be alright and how I'm still on the path to success. I'm affirming of the directions I want to go and discouraging of the directions I don't want to go. I might become more opinionated and critical of the things I don't want to be, and more glorifying of the things I aim to be. I'm likely to sound more egotistical. I say what I need to hear. And since there's a limit to how much I can hear and believe when I'm talking to myself, I'll tell other people too. Even if they don't particularly want to hear it. When the external supports are pulled out we need to replace them with a more potent self-generated identity and narrative. This has personal implications but also social ones. Radical or fundamentalist movements tend to catch on more readily in bad economies.

I have an old friend, a former bandmate a guy I remember as pretty easy going back when he was married and had a good job and his life ahead of him. He dropped out of contact after borrowing a few thousand dollars he never returned. Recently he showed up on facebook, older, a little down on his luck. He now calls himself "Prince" something, and wrote me the other day to say that he's discovered the meaning of my life and would like to teach it to me. No doubt.

Is it reasonable for me to judge his egoism in comparison to mine and say he's overdoing it? Perhaps, but only if I'm willing to factor our respective environmental contexts. He may actually be less egotistical than me even though he's behaving more egotistically. If I was as down on my luck as he is, maybe I'd behave even more egotistically.

And conversely, if I was up on my luck I'd probably be less egotistical than I am. It's not surprising to see cool, easy-going confidence in popular people. It's no mystery that popular gurus can maintain the appearance of enlightened selflessness. First, eyes are on them expecting them to be selfless. Second, eyes are on them. They don't have to generate much of a sense of self because it's being generated for them.

If your partner has lost her job and you haven't, they're likely to act more needy than you. You do them an unfair disservice if you treat it as a character flaw without factoring in the way you've still got your structure supports and she doesn't. The people who are not busy talking themselves up may be no less needy than the loudest egos around. They simply may need less self-affirmation because so much of the affirmation is supplied externally.

If you find yourself more self-absorbed than usual, more inclined to tell everyone about you big bright new plans and great prospects, keep your environment in mind. What it doesn't supply anymore, you're going to probably try to supply from somewhere else, and though it may make you sound egotistical, you may have to increase your self-serving pep-talks at least until you get yourself back on your feet and in the company of people whose presence tacitly affirms you.

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Constraint propagation: A completely new take on souls

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:35:58 +0000

It's not true about the 21 grams. That was an error in measurement back in 1907 when Duncan McDougall claimed to have weighed a soul. There's no weight loss with death, which is fine with most people because we've long assumed the soul was a weightless, sizeless, timeless substance anyway.

Still, weightless, size-less, timeless substances are scientific dead ends. If there's no way to detect a thing, then there's no way for science to get a grip on it. That's fine with most fans of the soul. Science should keep its hands off souls. But it's not OK with scientists. The dead end forces them to look for another explanation for why living bodies act so differently from dead ones.

They have a new explanation, but it's not a thing. It is, in fact weightless and sizeless, but not timeless or a substance. I don't mean to be mysterious. I'm talking science so let me be concrete.

Picture a small pile of metal. A machinist shapes it up and voila you've got, let's say, a lock and key. It's great. It's got function. It serves your purposes. Much more so than a small pile of metal. So what did you add that made it functional?

Oxford professor Michael Polanyi says nothing was added. What makes it functional is not an addition but a subtraction. A pile of metal can take all sorts of forms. You can pile it this way; you can pile it that way. Locks and keys are highly constrained. Machinists make the parts with what they call "low tolerances" meaning a lot of constraint and specificity on their shapes and sizes so that the parts interact with each other just so.

As a result, the lock and key do fewer things, not more than the pile did. When the lock and key get old and worn out, they lose function, but, Polanyi points out, they do so by gaining more possibilities, more configurations of the parts or technically, more "degrees of freedom." In other words the parts get looser than they were. Now the old clunker can jam or the key flops around.

A broken machine does more things, not less. We prefer our machines highly constrained. An unreliable computer has more behaviors, more states it can be in. A reliable one has less, only the behaviors we want. The weightless, sizeless non-substance that makes things functional is constraint. You can't talk about the weight of the states the lock and key can't be in. You can't talk about the size of the states they can't be in. The states they can't be in aren't some added substance. But you can talk about time because constraint is a difference that occurs over time: Before, a loose pile of metal; after, a constrained lock and key, after, again a loose lock and key.

I used to have an unreliable computer. I'm not saying whose operating system it ran, but I'll tell you it was way too versatile for me. I was amazed by the sheer variety of ways it would act. It seemed to invent new creative ways of bombing every day. For example, at the drop of a hat it would do blue screens which I'll grant was clever but not what I wanted when writing under a deadline. I wanted it to behave itself, to show some self-constraint. One day I got out of my blue-lighted chair and dropped down to the competitor's store. I had heard that their computers were less versatile. They did fewer things like blue screening. That was fine with me. I didn't need versatility; I needed functional constraint. I bought one and it's been a good three years for me and my much more limited computer.

As a result, I've become more constrained too. I love my replacement computer by which I mean to say I'm constrained by it. I'd even say loyal, addicted and domesticated to it. Before, if you asked me what kind of computer I wanted, I'd have been more flexible. Now, I'm less flexible. I want only the kind I have. It is, what in business we call a proprietary good, one you shop for by brand. You accept no substitutes. In other words, you're constrained by it.

My computer's makers likes it that way. They wants me to be as loyal, addicted and domesticated as I am. And now that the likes of me are buying their products, their employees go to work and rather than working on just anything all day, they're highly constrained too. They're constrained to working on how to make things that are constrained the way people like me want them to be. That way we customers will become that much more loyal, addicted and domesticated to their products. In other words more constrained.

And then also if a friend asks me what kind of computer to buy, I won't say "Oh, I don't know," or name any of a dozen other brands. I'll be constrained to saying this brand. And in that way the constraint spreads or propagates.

And what has this got to do with souls? Constraint and constraint propagation apply all the way up and down, with differences along the way that mark the shift from physics to chemistry, to biology to psychology sociology.

At the bottom, if you read my article about Broken Symmetry, you'll find constraint even there. Remember, as the balanced broomstick tips over, the more it tips the more it tips? Before it tips, it is balanced symmetrically. It could tip in any direction. After it tips, its tip-able direction is highly and increasingly constrained.

Your body is not a machine made by a man or, I'll argue, a creator. At least for scientists to fulfill their (constrained) obligation, they can't settle for saying the soul is a weightless, size-less, time-less substance that is made by a bigger fancier weightless, size-less, time-less substance. We can't therefore treat a living soulful being as the equivalent of lock and key made by the machinist. Still, in its functionality, your body and even your mind are like the lock and key if only in that they do consist of parts that are highly constrained to and by each other, and to their context. As the great philosopher Emannuel Kant said, "The definition of an organic body is that it is a body, every part of which is there for the sake of the other (reciprocally as end, and at the same time, means)”

In later articles I'll talk more about how Kant's "means and ends" business relates to constraint, constraint propagation, causality, the origin of life, and souls, and also to missing the sweet souls that come and go in our lives.

In the mean time, if this article constrains your thinking even a little, let it be by encouraging you to tip less toward explaining all behaviors as caused by new things and more toward explanations based on constraint. The leading researcher in this area, Terrence Deacon says, the whole is not more than the sum of its parts, its less. In other words, when parts start interacting with each other as wholes, they constrain each other. The whole lock does less things than the pile of metal pieces can do.

And I know I know, this material is likely to give a reader a headache. That's the way it is with novel constraints sometimes, like the ones imposed by new counter-intuitive ideas. I'll do my best to keep these reflections grounded. And after all, it might be worth the effort. Researchers like Deacon are coming at old mysteries from new angles that might finally split them open, explaining lots.

Causality's gremlins: We think we've exterminated them, but nope.

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:20:52 +0000

Witches, goblins, and gremlins with magical powers, kings hand-picked by God, glass spheres with star-holes encapsulating the earth, rocks falling to earth because they want to be where they belong...

Yup, the cluelessness of past generation's assumptions is laughable. It makes us proud we've overcome it. It also makes us wonder what we assume today that will look clueless to future generations.

To overcome cluelessness, we try to doubt all of our assumptions. But you can't doubt assumptions you don't know you make.

If I had to bet where we're most clueless today, it would be about causality. We think science has licked it, but some persistent mysteries suggest that we're missing something. I know, I know. Whenever someone says there's more to causality than meets the eye, responsible thinkers say, "Uh-oh, blast from the past, I'm about to be pitched on some magical woo-woo gremlin power."

I'm not pitching gremlins. In fact, the opposite, I'm arguing that while scientists claim victory in purging the gremlins, they're still harboring stow-aways they don't notice or won't acknowledge. They try to explain life by dissecting it into its parts, but then ambiguously treat the parts as both lifeless as rocks and as purposeful as gremlins. For example, we treat genes as nothing more than chemical strands, and at the same time the builders and organizers of bodies. Likewise, we treat brains as meat-webs of trigger cells, but also as the seat of the soul. Exposing this problem, Biologist Paul Weiss, winner of the prestigious National Medal of Science said: “In trying to restore the loss of information suffered by thus lifting isolated fragments out of context, we have assigned the job of reintegration to a corps of anthropomorphic gremlins. As a result, we are now plagued-or blessed, depending on one's party view-with countless demigods, like those in antiquity, doing the jobs we do not understand: the organizers, operators, inductors, repressors, promoters, regulators, etc.,—all prosthetic devices to make up for the amputations which we have allowed to be perpetrated on the organic wholeness, or to put it more innocuously, the "systems" character, of nature and of our thinking about nature.”

I promised constraint propagation for this column. It's a key to what I think future generations will say we were missing about causality. That will be next column. But first, to reveal the blind-spot, a very short history of thought about causality:

We hear the first careful wondering about the nature of causality in Aristotle. He distinguished four kinds, and to illustrate them, describes how all four contribute to a house being built:

Material cause: The lumber, nails, windows.
Formal cause: The plans for configuring the materials
Efficient cause: The carpenter's work, hammering nails; sawing wood.
Final cause: The goal or final end--that for which the house is built--providing future shelter to someone.

For centuries people assumed everything had its four causes, with their final causes built right into them. You are born with your purpose built right into you. A rock falls to the ground because being on the ground is the rock's final cause--its goal.

The church came to see things Aristotle's way too. God was the carpenter (efficient cause) of the universe, he had the plans (formal cause) and the goal or purpose (final cause) for all matter (material cause). He had endowed everything with its purpose.

Kings and popes claimed that their plans were God's plans and that people should simply get with God's program. By the end of the middle ages though, people started to wonder about it, spurred by frustration with the oppression perpetrated in God's name, the conflict between supposedly God-elected leaders, and exposure to successful cultures with different Gods.

And then Newton demonstrated there was no glass ceiling on either the earth or causality--we weren't encased in God's glass spheres as had been thought since Aristotle. All motion on earth and in the infinite heavens could be explained by efficient cause alone. No purpose--just action and reaction. When asked what final cause or purpose gravity served, Newton said "I wouldn't feign a hypothesis."

Philosophers started to notice that final cause was actually a pretty sketchy concept. How can needing a future house cause the existence of one today? That's backwards causality. Ultimately, the sciences rejected final cause as a kind of blind faith.

Everywhere that efficient cause was successful and began to dominate in explanations, it tended to crowd out final cause. After all if it's all just things bumping into each other, what do you need with purposes. But people weren't going to drop purpose just like that. So there have been clashes and ultimately a rip in the treatment of causality.

An early and significant move like this was made by the Muslims in the late 11th century. Muslims had allowed for both efficient and final cause for centuries. Their science had far outpaced the West's. Suddenly they doubted that you could have it both ways. Either things moved the way they did because a purposeful God moved them, or because of efficient cause. The Muslims at long last decided to surrender more fully to God's purposes and in the process they ended up surrendering their scientific edge to the West.

And in the West too, there have been repeated backlashes against efficient cause's dominance. The "Fideists" who said we'll never be able to explain all behavior with efficient cause alone and therefore that we should trust in God or the Bible. Luther, who demanded faith in God's purposes over reason. The romantics--who thought science was killing spirit, and then today's fundamentalists of every stripe who despite their fierce battles against each other share a commitment to some higher purpose as the ultimate and final cause.

Still, with commitment to efficient cause alone, science took off like gangbusters. It's as though being able to talk about something's purposes had killed curiosity. You could explain anything by saying "it's meant to do that." Now that purpose was barred from science, people really had to figure out how to explain what causes things by means alone, not by ends. Why was there lightning? Not so God could purposefully threaten and punish sinners, but because of the discharge of electro-magnetic energy. The question "Why?" in science stopped meaning "to what end?" and became instead "by what means?"

And science claimed victory. No more gremlins.

Except they keep showing up, for example in what's called the functionalist approach to biology where evolution itself is treated as a master gremlin. Evolution is both a passive statistical process whereby things simply last different lengths of time, and it's also the blind watchmaker, the innovator, creator and designer of functional parts. Where the ambiguity is most exposed is in evolutionary psychology, a source of great insights but also often a weakly disciplined inquiry in which so long as you can come up with a trait's function or purpose, you don't have to wonder much by what means it arose.

Science based exclusively on efficient cause isn't going to cut it. There is final cause, or else we simply can't explain the radical shift in that appears with life and mind. Next piece will get at constraint propagation as promised. And if we researchers interested in it are onto something, you'll be among this generation's first to know about and apply it.

Broken Symmetry: Nobel physicist explains why you miss old places, friends

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:41:16 +0000

The bittersweet sad intense pain of missing a place, a person, a crew, a time.

What's with that? How does that happen? Here's a take on it you probably haven't heard before.

I'll start way back with the big bang. If everything was all concentrated and homogeneous at the origin, how did our universe ever get so lumpy, with separate things like stars and planets, you and me? The 2008 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to scientists who identified the source as broken symmetry. A first pass explanation of their idea is simple.

You know how you can easily balance a broomstick on the palm of your hand? If it's centered, symmetrically upright, it tends to stay there. But if it tips asymmetrically toward one direction, then it becomes increasingly difficult to balance. The symmetry was broken. The tipped get tippier.

The butterfly effect is the most familiar version of this. Remember it? Conceivably a butterfly's wings flapping could lead to major shifts in weather patterns. People latched onto that idea as evidence of uncertainty and the potential for miracles. We like ideas that suggest that life has chutes-and-ladder-like qualities, so it's not just stepwise plodding. It gives us hope of rag-to-riches leverage but also allows that if we don't end up fulfilling our ambitions we have an explanation that makes it not our fault: "I tried, but life has surprising shoots and I fell down one."

Shoots and ladders aside, the butterfly effect is really about broken symmetry, how a little thing can start a big thing. How just as a slight tip can cause the broomstick to fall or how a shout can cause an avalanche. Think of it also as the way a meteorite passing the earth could fall under our gravitational influence, being taken off course. The closer it gets to the earth, the stronger the earth's gravitational pull. That's broken symmetry too.

With the big bang everything flew apart. It would have flown apart evenly but the tiniest little micro-variation got things tipping. Not falling over as like the broomstick but comparable. The universe got lumpy by the same basic process that made our moon. The moon formed when a meteor hit the earth kicking up an enormous dust cloud. Imagine that the dust started out almost evenly distributed, but little variations caused the gravitational pull in some regions to be greater than in others. The dense grew denser. And now most of that dust is concentrated in that great lump of green cheese. A little difference in distribution causes a big difference in concentrations. Broken symmetry explains seperateness and difference.

There's broken symmetry in thought and culture too. You meet someone, fall under their gravitational influence, start hanging out, fall further. For good or ill--it could be the love of your life or a heroin dealer. Either way a little tipping becomes a lot. And these days we're rarely tipped in just one direction. In ancient tribal days, you could be born into a tribe that tipped you strongly into its ways there, in the tribe you would stay for all your days. Now, we're under diverse influences. You move a thousand miles to be with your new partner, but miss your old town and people. You design your whole life around a job you love and then they lay you off and you have to find a new place to orbit.

Broken symmetry implies something really fundamental about the universe but also about your life. If the universe is lumpy, then this notion that we are all one and that everything is connected needs to be refined. We are all one but some of us are more one than others of us. Everything is connected but not equally. There are plenty of people who have negligible influence on you. They are off in their own lumpy region under their own influences. They're not part of your tribe and therefore are different from you. But then you happen to meet. You've been on independent pages a long time so you start out on different pages. But vive la difference, you like each other. Being with each other you start to influence each other. But lumpy life that it is, you're not just under their influence. You've got other influences operating on you from before and they still tug. So you miss what you had even while your drawn into what you're having. We are all planets under changing influences falling in with some and tearing away from others. Something like that.

There's more to this story of course. In particular I'll want to say more about influence. How does influence happen? For that we get into another one of these new scientific concepts: Constraint propagation.

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Emergence research: Just how did matter become mattering?

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:02:44 +0000

I work in a field called emergence which is trying to solve such ginormous mysteries as how information emerges from energy, how life emerges from chemistry, how selves emerge from atoms, how soulishness emerges from life, how purpose emerges from non-purpose.

We're not asking whether they do. Evidence suggests strongly that they do, and not the other way around with God, the great purposeful and informed soul in the sky making atoms and chemistry.

We're not asking why they emerged either. Or where or when, because it's safe to assume they didn't just emerge here in our neighborhood of the universe.

No, we're asking precisely how they emerge. We seek a scientific account as solid as science's explanation for lightning, clouds or tides. No smoke and mirrors, no woo woo or fancy technical sounding forces we claim exist but can't explain, no thumbs on the scale, no sneaking a God in to give it a nudge, no appeals to one mystery like quantum mechanics to explain another mystery like purpose.

The question boils down to how matter becomes mattering.

The philosopher John Stuart Mill got the ball rolling on emergence research when he noted that two toxic substances, chlorine gas and sodium metal, when combined produced common table salt. He thought there must be some special combinatorial logic that makes it so the attributes of parts don't simply add up to the attributes of wholes. He speculated that the same combinatorial logic might explain how life emerges from chemistry. In this he raised questions about where properties really reside. If sodium metal is toxic here but not there, does it have the property of toxicity? Do any things have properties and if not where do their properties reside?

To leap out a few levels, personality researchers originally thought that people had personalities that stayed pretty much fixed. Lately they've noticed that, as with the chemicals that make salt, what we're with makes a difference to what we are. A shy person in some contexts becomes bold. A grumpy person in some contexts becomes sweet. If you hang out with overweight people you tend to gain weight. Your deepest held values are largely inherited from the company you keep.* As political scientists say "Where you stand depends on where you sit."

I called soul "soulishness" to hint at this mutability. In the enlightenment the solidity of souls was questioned. Descartes and others thought of souls as the unchangable parts of our natures that even outlast our bodies. The French philosopher La Metre scoffed, noting that if you get a guy drunk his soul is radically altered. Some said that's not the soul but an overlay on it, as though the soul is your original face over which you can put a drunkard's mask. Another French philosopher Diderot wondered whether there was really an original face under the masks. Maybe we were nothing but masks. Or to put it another way, maybe a soul wasn't a specific thing with specific characteristics but rather a range of behaviors on various dimensions. Your personality is like a mixing board--you dial up your charm here, you mute your sexuality there--you change the mix depending on the company you're keeping. You might have noticed this at a party that brought together friends from your various circles. It can be hard to know what personality to wear. Over there are your professional colleagues, and sitting right next to them are your old party animal friends from high school. You don't know quite how to be. Who are you anyway?

Mill's salt example gives us a hint at how relationship changes properties. The toxic parts of chlorine gas bind with the toxic parts of sodium metal. Locking to each other their toxicity is constrained or bound up. We're protected from their toxic natures but you could also say that their toxic natures are protected from the outside. Nobel laureate Physicist Robert Laughlin notes the relevant obvious: Molecules by themselves don't roll but if you bind enough of them together they become "protected" in the form of a wheel. The rolling property emerges. Protection like this is one reason why you can't simply add the part's qualities to get the whole's qualities. Some are locked off or protected in their effects on the whole.

And in fact, though the rest of us haven't quite caught on--nor do we have to for everyday thought--physicists have now demonstrated that there are no solid stable indivisible things. Atom means indivisible thing, and atomism is now officially dead. Even at the atomic and subatomic levels everything is sub-divideable and moving all the time. When researching emergence we have to factor in this otherwise ignorable feature of causality. A thing is really a dynamic process whose features result from their ever changing interactions. What we perceive as a thing is really a habitually stable dynamical relationship in which the parts happen to cycle through similar states consistently enough that they become reliable. Even a salt crystal could become unstable breaking into its separate toxic components. It just doesn't tend to nearly often or long enough to pose a problem. A wheel, then isn't a solid thing made of solid things, it's a dance routine in which each dancer is a dance routine in which each dancer is a dance routine, etc.

It's a very hard concept to wrap one's mind around. And of course unlike a dance routine, these aren't choreographed by outsiders or intended by their parts. A wheel's molecule doesn't have a leader inside or out who says "C'mon people let's work together on this."

So how do the dance routines emerge, especially in the composition of living beings? That's what emergentists are working on. And we're making great progress. I predict that within five to ten years we'll have a solid and well accepted scientific answer. Can you imagine that? Science really explaining how mattering bootstraps it's way out of matter with no Godly assist? Whether it would change a lot of minds, it certainly would change the dimensions of the debate. It would no longer be a forced choice between life serving God's purposes and life being completely meaningless. It would no longer be, you are the soul that God gave you vs. you are a chembot zombie meat puppet with no soul.

Another take-away therefore from this research is an overlooked factor in causality. We think of things as caused by outside things pushing them. The bowling pin fell when it was hit by the bowling ball. There's another kind of causality that is getting a lot of attention in science these days. It's the way the internal dynamics--the dance routine between the parts--constrain each other, limiting their ability to move in certain ways. Think salt again. It's two component chemicals are mutual constraints on each other, restricting what they can do. Anthropomorphizing, you could say the two chemicals are like two buddies in the buddy system at some drug-rehab program: I'll keep you in line if you'll keep me in line. We tend to think of constraint as the enemy of free-will, but it's not. Think of how the drug-rehab buddies, if successful, restore free will. Self-discipline is just such internal self-constraint a dance routine in which the sub-routines keep each other in line. The successfully self-disciplined are those who negotiate with themselves and win. They win more autonomy and self-directedness. People with self-discipline generally have more free will to work with. Paradoxically freedom is a matter of forming the right constraints.

* This last point is a growing issue. For an amazing reflection on how the internet is making us much more parochial about the company we keep check out this current issue New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/02/091102crbo...

Get a life: Should it mean understand a life or just move on?

Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D. — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:57:08 +0000

When things don't go well, those of us who are receptive/prone to self-doubt wonder why and whose fault it was. We toss and turn the hot potato of guilt. We want to hand it off quickly but the potato comes back. So we cycle.

People say "don't over-think it," and I understand. You can think too much about something, trying to squeeze lessons out that aren't there. Of course you can also under-think things and not learn lessons worth learning. How much we think about things isn't governed exclusively by what the situation demands. It's also a function of what our minds supply. Some people say "you think too much" merely because they are up against the limits of their own ability to think, or because they don't want to go there.

How much we ruminate is also a function of what other demands are being placed on the mind. When they say "get a life," they often mean you wouldn't be focusing on this problem if you had other things to think about. They also might mean when life is going right, by definition you don't wondering what made it go wrong. Success is the best revenge, but better yet, it's the best way to get over wanting revenge. The people I know who in late life dwell most on their parent's shortcomings have the most present-day dissatisfaction to somehow explain. Therapy is wonderfully useful, but sometimes the real peace comes from getting a life.

Of course the people who say "get a life" might also mean please shut up because I can't afford to go there, I don't have the brain power, I'm afraid of what's out there, I 'm dismissing you because your concern is a threat. I can't afford to learn new life lessons.

That's the problem with all advice, counsel, feedback or guidance: It can be true or useful or false and harmful. I've never met a truth that couldn't be put to abusive use.

Dwelling on why things didn't go well can be the source of great insight, how we come to understand or "get" our lives, or life in general. Life is like being dropped down by helicopter into a strange land with a mission to take notes and figure out what the deal is. If you never reflected on why things turn out disappointingly you're not likely to adaptively adjust expectations and figure out much about what this place called life is like.

As used typically "Get a life" is a halting move, a way of saying stop thinking about that. Halting moves are necessary. We can't think about everything always. We must prioritize. A skill worth cultivating is the ability to decide what deserves more thought and what deserves less. And then of course it takes other skills to implement your decisions, because it's not always easy getting your mind to focus where you decide it should.

I've tracked the slang that has accumulated around halting moves, the new phrases that say don't go there and the ones that say do. For example, on the don't side there's get a life, get over it, talk to the hand, get over yourself, don't worry be happy, it's all good, no worries, peace, it is what it is, whatever, too much information. And on the do think of it side there's how's that working out for you?, more about that, let's double click on that. I think we collect more ways to say don't go there than do.

I've decided to try to write shorter pieces for now, so I won't double click on why we need more ways to say don't go there, at least not in this piece. Next week I want to talk about another factor that goes into deciding how much to think about whose at fault: The fundamental limitations on accurately attributing fault, guilt, or blame in longer intimate collaborations. I call it the F.U.D.G.E. factor: Fundamentally Unattributable Distributed General Error.