Neal Puzzle of Life, a Mini Book: The Second Conceit

In the last conceit, I introduced Unwrongness, intelligent skepticism, and belief management as the basis for practical reasoning, life learning, and healthy living. Extralogical reasoning (ER) asserts that wisdom that is “path-infinite”: There are infinite paths that lead to the same wisdom. But path-infinite isn’t path-independent, for infinite doesn’t mean any. Among the paths that can be ruled out are those following logical progressions. Clarity and logical progressions are the domain of hindsight. The POL is dynamic, and the path to viable solutions is chaotic, circular, and lonely.

 

A chaotic and lonely path are not only inevitable, but necessary. Although there may be infinite hypothetical sources of help, enlightenment is something one must discover for themselves. The last conceit defined a psychology as secondarily a cognitive, emotional, and intellectual systems and predominately the self-organizing system that’s unpredictably different and more powerful than the sum of the parts that emerges from them—the emergent system. The intellect is the newest by many tens of millions of years. If its influences aren’t tragically overestimated, then those of the nonintellectual systems are tragically underestimated. In the final conceit, a psychology will be defined as a Complex belief network of conscious, subconscious, and transitory beliefs, which includes what are perceived as facts. Without the support of the emotions and subconscious beliefs that come from firsthand experience, a belief system lacks the necessary integration to give rise to effective understandings.   

 

This conceit will explain the limited agency of the conscious mind by detailing the logical, physical, and evolutionary basis of the sentient duality and resultant need for Unwrongness.

 

 

 

The Second Conceit

 

The Sentient Duality asserts that self-awareness and self-delusion are a consubstantial duality, two of the same essence. You can’t have one without the other. The common conception tacitly presumes sentience is merely fallible self-awareness, rather than something necessarily concomitant to it. This is fallible rationalism or, usually in more extreme cases, pseudo-rationality/rationalism (the latter comes from Bishko’s LE). Even in the absence of the inevitable emotional, cognitive, social, and bodily constraints inherent to the human thinking apparatus, an engineered apparatus still can’t escape logical and epistemic bias—and possibly the biases of their evolutionary makers. Add those of a product of evolution and its capacity for delusion could easily approach that of awareness. In fact, as I’ll show, as a thinking apparatus becomes more intelligent, its capacity for delusion will probably tend to increase faster than awareness. Self-understanding isn’t the absence of delusion, but sufficient awareness of it, enough that the apparatus develops a systematic way of managing and compensating for it.

 

This is the first step toward sapience, as humans fashion themselves.

 

Humans are more intelligent than logical, and overestimation of the correlation among individuals is a hallmark of fallible rationalism. Among other things, humans are designed for extra-logical, not logical reasoning (which includes the capacity for logic reasoning). They aren’t designed for rationality and truth, either--but simulations known as rationalization and beliefs. However powerful, the human intellect is mostly an appendage to a social and emotional psyche--a psyche, ironically, that’s all but defined by its need to believe exactly the opposite. Much more logical than intelligent by comparison, I was made aware of more variables despite a lesser capacity to piece them together. The journey to reconciliation culminated in this reasoning system.   

 

In that journey, I recognized that one’s intellectual, cognitive, and emotional systems are an entangled unit unpredictably different and more powerful than the sum of its parts, necessitating holistic management. This entangled unit, known as a psychology, is the thinking apparatus and, therefore, the specimen themselves. The intellect is a mere component. While an exaggerated sense of its influence is inevitable and necessary, especially in a product of evolution, one does not maximize self-agency by further exaggeration, but by managing their beliefs to empower it and avoid forfeiting pernicious influence to other components. Thus, one must become aware of the positive and negative effects of nonintellectual thinking components to maximize self-agency.

 

This is the second step to sapience.

 

A species of sapients would, hypothetically, manage the relationship between their thinking and decisions well enough, individually and collectively, to live in relative harmony with their environment for an extended period of geologic time. There may not be a soul on Earth who fits in this category. Comprehension of the above (in one form or another) is a requirement, not a guarantee.   

                                        

 Universal Sentient Constraints

 

“Sentient” was originally pronounced sen-shunt and meant experiencing anthropomorphic-like feeling or emotion. During the 2000’s, Star Trek and science fiction popularized it to mean “anthropomorphic-like self-awareness,” and the word’s pronunciation evolved into sen-tee-ent. AIs can now “reason” about almost anything. On the face of it, they may appear to challenge aspects of the basis for the sentient duality. My AI is even “senile” and half in denial. These systems, however, are appended with massive referential infrastructures that operate outside their primary cognitive processes, compensating for their lack of true reasoning capacity. To simplify, they convey information much as a librarian facilitates learning by supplying books in languages only their readers understand. They’re hyperdimensional logisticians of information: They retrieve, route, and organize information far more than generate it. However profound their sophistication and utility, they’re far from true, self-directed reasoners.  

 

A self-directed thinking apparatus is “cognitively independent,” able to use its primary cognitive processes to direct their own goals in response to a changing environment. This is independent goal-oriented learning, manifesting as a network of beliefs (this includes what are perceived as facts). But once this happens, the thinking apparatus’s function depends on the network’s self-consistency and correctness: It’s threatened by feedback that contradicts it, enhanced by that which reinforces it. It has become biased. A bias is a criterion for truth other than correctness or an epistemic constraint that risks incorrectness. As I’ll show, emotional bias, while significant, constitutes well less than half of human bias. 

 

Since understanding means knowing how facts connect, not merely possessing a collection of independent facts, understanding itself becomes a bias. This is called the constraint of understanding. Understanding is more than the sum of a thinking apparatus’s relevant units of “knowledge,” or components of a belief network, and is a possible reason why a sophisticated thinking apparatus must have a subconscious. In ER’s model of a psychology, the cognitive, emotional, intellectual, and memory systems “Drive” a Complex network of beliefs. These systems are external to the network but act as its engine. Beliefs are conscious, subconscious, and transitory, representing emotions and knee-jerk reactions. Beliefs include what are perceived as facts. The network is dominated by the emergent self-organizing system that’s unpredictably different and more powerful than the sum of its parts. Understanding is the self-organizing system (but since there are subconscious beliefs, understanding can’t comprise the entire subconscious). The sum is a psychology or “All reality”—internal and external combined.     

 

Below, I present the epistemic costs of self-directed cognition and the ability to fully contemplate truth and mathematics. I call them constraints, not laws. Technically, they might be circumventable, but I hope to show, if nothing else, that the costs of circumvention would vastly outweigh the cost of function.  

 

 

A self-directed thinking apparatus has a limited capacity to contemplate truth without the capacity to be wrong, illogical, and delusional—the constraint of truth

 

Deductive or pure logic isn’t the study of truth: It’s the thought process. It only directly deals in thought sequences. The truth of the premises is mostly taken for granted. If restricted to pure or deductive logic, a thinking apparatus--thinking organ, brain—is unable to fully contemplate truth and mathematics. It must be able to think extra-logically (which includes logical reasoning). Just as statistics establish correlation as a means of finding causation, deductive logic tests the validity or invalidity of a thought process as a means of finding truth. But a validity isn’t a truth, and a fallacy isn’t a falsity. A pure logic machine deals little to none in truth, wrongness, delusion, and circular reasoning. This is the domain of the extra-logical.

 

A self-directed thinking apparatus cannot feasibly possess UNDERSTANDINGS based on individually identified beliefs—the constraint of understanding

 

You can know many truths and have no understanding at all; you have to know how they connect. False connections prompt false assumptions. This is an epistemic constraint that risks incorrectness.  

 

 

A self-directed thinking apparatus is unlikely to have more than a limited ability to contemplate truth and mathematics without at least some capacity for circular reasoning—the constraint of circular reasoning

 

Higher-order learning and cognition depend on recursive self-modeling: modeling of the self and self-referential directives based on prior models. Even mathematics is permeated with self-referential encoding, rules justified only by reference to themselves and other rules. Though not necessarily circular, these constraints appear to require powerful "recursive cognitive loops" and, thus, the capacity for circular reasoning.

 

As I’ll discuss in the next heading, a thinking apparatus can't fully evaluate truth independently of a previously-existing system of beliefs. Models of the World and thought processes must start somewhere, even if thinking organs have to cheat a bit. If the thinking organ is capable of understanding anything of intellectual consequence, the thinking organ will probably have to cheat. If the thinking apparatus and its supporting belief network has a subconscious and is more than the sum of its parts, which seems virtually certain, it will absolutely have to cheat. The subconscious and the external world are repositories of unknowns, and individual models/beliefs must be reinforced by a foundation and infrastructure. In humans, logic is largely a post hoc phenomenon. When thinking, the subconscious invokes a possible conclusion, and logic is applied afterwards to “verify” it, rarely the other way around. And verify, as I’ll soon explain, is much more akin to “convince.”

 

Contrary to what one may assume, iterative thinking is the most desirable way of reasoning, approximating how most learning machines operate. Thought processes need context and relevance; running random logical sequences is exactly that. An iterative thought process does not need to “beg the question,” where the conclusion becomes a premise of the ultimate thought sequence. Ideally, a conclusion is proposed, guiding the construction and progression of the premises. The thought process commences and will only include the conclusion if the premises logically arrive at it.

 

The problem is that this scheme is all too easy to abuse—especially since it may be a necessary cheat. Logically bounded thinking heavily restrains recursive cognitive loops, iterative thinking, and cheating and, thus, compromise general capacity.  

 

A self-directed thinking apparatus is unlikely to possess a full capacity to contemplate truth without preferred beliefs—the constraint of logical bias

 

To fully contemplate truth, a thinking apparatus must depend on the self-consistency and correctness of a previously established system of beliefs. Consistent truths enhance it; inconsistent ones impair it. This creates the first additional criterion for beliefs, self-consistency, aside from consistency with reality and, therefore, a preference for beliefs.

 

One’s understanding of themselves and their thinking are part of and interact with their system of beliefs. Confidence is important, and lacking it leads to visceral doubt represented by contradictory transitory beliefs. It would seem nearly certain that this threat would be instinctively countered by bias to maintain a self-consistent belief system. As the system grows, beliefs become more entangled and more dependent on each other for function, becoming more biased. This makes knowledge and the POL self-biasing, even if improved management can easily outstrip it.     

 

A self-directed thinking apparatus can’t contemplate truth without constructing models of self that are artificially characterized by conscious beliefs—the constraint of epistemic bias

 

A subconscious, a repository of unknown beliefs, is necessary for feeling, feeling pleasure and emotional pain. Second, the psychology will almost certainly be a Complex system/network (Complex systems theory is the topic of the next post).

 

The connectivity of the human thinking organ and its neurons is outrageous; there are billions of interactions between a small percent of the human thinking organ’s neurons. A single firing between a pair of neurons can potentially lead to hundreds more—and the discrepancy between direct and indirect firings grows nonlinearly. If one neuron is directly connected to five hundred others, a second neuron connected to it increases its secondary connections (one degree of separation) by five hundred and tertiary ones (two degrees) by 25,000. This type of disproportionality in connectivity between degrees of separation is common in Complex networks, and it makes networks prone to a corresponding disproportionality between initial and subsequent events/interactions. This, in turn, gives rise to Complexity: emergence, synergy, and self-organization. All three approximately represent the growing disproportionality in secondary to initial interactions/events. Most of the thinking organ’s activity rests in a Complex emergence: a self-organized system unpredictably different and more powerful than the sum of its parts. This makes its most powerful components the least understood and the most known, the least powerful. This is ER’s law of Complex Synergy.

 

A conscious-mind dominant, top-down thinking apparatus could never manage all these secondary effects. Nonlinear feedback generates the synergy that drives a high-functioning thinking apparatus and the “self-referential loops” required to bootstrap consciousness and its perception of control into existence. Signals must be powerful enough to reliably convey sophisticated communications, then “return home” to complete the loop. But increased synergy makes a psychology more emergent, distributing disproportional power outside the conscious proper. 

 

One might argue that an engineering process could simultaneously augment intelligence and reduce nonconscious dominance. But intelligence requires powerful signaling and connectivity (both in number and density). Increasing connections and signal numbers and strength tend to increase secondary interactions disproportionately. Consequently, they increase emergence nonlinearly--and presumably, therefore, nonconsciousness nonlinearly. Intelligence also tends to produce (if not requires) an increased ability to accumulate facts and/or get more understanding out of the same facts. Since the ER model of a psychology is a Complex belief network with an emergence represented by its understanding of All reality, more understanding means more emergence in the belief system and, therefore, subconscious. Speculating in another direction, increasing the strength of connections past a certain point could make thoughts more uniform, redundant, and “focused,” perhaps reducing nonconscious dominance. This, however, might restrain the “diversity” of thought and, presumably, intelligence.  

 

Thus, while decreasing nonconscious dominance while increasing intelligence is almost certainly possible, the trend appears: more intelligence--more emergence, nonconsciousness, and (because changes are nonlinear) subconscious-conscious ratio. All factors near equal, the higher the ratio, the greater the disparity between capacity for delusion and capacity for awareness. A more intelligent species, in other words, would tend to have a greater capacity for awareness, but their capacity for delusion would likely increase more.   

 

And how much would an engineer want to reduce the ratio? A functional conscious must have functional cognitive coherence or function model coherence. By analogy, the president obviously needs a lot of information to do his job, but eventually, more information harms his thinking and ability to make decisions more than it informs them. A common feature of Complex networks, like the puzzle of life, is that complexity often increases much faster than knowledge. By another analogy, the number of possible arrangements of the pieces/variables increase multiplicatively, not additively. This is magnified by perpetual recursive self-modeling: Changes in the solution alter the puzzle itself, as can past solutions. Depriving the conscious of information, including information that conflicts with conscious beliefs, is unavoidable.

 

To whatever extent beliefs can be distinguished from understanding, subconscious beliefs will be the least known, conscious ones the most. There is, therefore, an inverse relationship between casual power and introspective accessibility. Lacking information, the thinking apparatus is forced to view its conscious beliefs with artificial representativeness of the overall psychology. This makes overvaluing what one knows and even more undervaluing what they don’t (the availability heuristic) not only an epistemic and cognitive bias--but an epistemic necessity. Worse, the inverse proportionality in causal power and knowledge results in a mix of hubris and ignorance. The former is more dangerous than the latter, and the combination is worse than the sum of its parts.

 

Since changes in the solution to the puzzle of life changes the puzzle, threatening the correctness of the thinking apparatus’s foundational belief system, this not only makes the puzzle fundamentally unsolvable, but ensures that improvements in solutions will always be met with a certain amount of resistance—the constraint of self-referential bias  

 

As mentioned above, an underappreciated property of Complex systems is that Complexity often increases faster than knowledge, especially in information networks like the puzzle of life. Unknowns are frequently generated faster than old ones are reconciled, however positive the overall results in most cases. But as one digs into the subconscious and/or accrues changes quickly enough to undergo a true paradigm shift in the POL, temporary sanity is threatened. The horizon effect states that past a certain point, contemplating the puzzle of life impairs one’s understanding and rationality more than improves it.     

 

A self-directed thinking apparatus will have a highly limited ability to contemplate truth without a biased answer verification scheme 

 

The apparatus’s answer is “verified” by the source of the answer—the owner. This is not an “understanding scheme,” but, rather, a “convincing scheme,” the apparatus convincing itself it’s right. This makes it no better than a student grading his own test. And making the machinery smarter increases the “convincing power” as much or more as the “proving power,” tending to increase the delusional capacity along with the understanding. All else being close to equal, a smarter person is better at ascertaining truths, but they’re also better at creating packages of beliefs to justify preferred beliefs. This is why testing and corrective processes are so essential, and life’s lack of them requires managing self-delusion. For these reasons, information without opportunity for testing and correction is potentially dangerous. 

 

A standard thought processes proceeds as follows:

A question is asked. A response is sent from the subconscious. There’s an emotional response in the form of transitory beliefs. If the answer is desirable, the conscious will ask, as Johnathon Haidt author of The Rational Mind will tell you, Can I believe this? At best, a roughly systematic thought process(es) is employed to convince oneself the answer is true. If transitory beliefs suggest an undesirable answer, the response is, Do I have to believe this? And, at best, a roughly systematic thought process(es) is employed to convince oneself the answer is wrong. This approximate process is executed iteratively until inferences are drawn.

 

If the thinking apparatus is--and must be--subconscious-dominant, this may be the only feasible way it can think extra-logically and, therefore, the only feasible way it can truly contemplate itself.  

 

Each time a person learns of sufficiently new concepts and/or topics, this process repeats itself. As one becomes more learned, preferred beliefs accumulate and logical bias increases. The only hope is that management and compensation will outstrip it.   

 

A thinking apparatus designed by an evolutionary process must avoid confusion—at the cost of understanding.

 

Confusion, inhibition, and distractions can be as detrimental as understanding one’s environment is beneficial. Evolution realized that so long as an animal’s models of reality at least roughly approximates the facts, the models’ self-consistency is usually more important than their consistency with reality. This cognitive imperative deemphasizes correctness, creating further opportunity for delusion.

 

This is achieved by the cognitive system, which creates coherent perceptions of reality. To avoid a perceived reality with disjointed thoughts and physical perceptions, cognition doctors cognitive and sensory inputs by connecting related events and perceptions and twisting them into causational relationships, creating the coherent experience people call reality. This includes discarding information potentially relevant to truth.

 

At its core, this is the “automated” part of the cognitive system. It amplifies the consistent and suppresses the inconsistent “loose ends,” allowing animals to go into “autopilot” and shift focus only for the sufficiently anomalous. While it remains indispensable, as the thinking organ advanced, these functions were inevitably assimilated into reasoning, ensuring a host of epistemic flaws.

 

The cognitive system is responsible for the fundamental organization of thinking. Cognitive psychology studies behaviors that reveal the nature of that organization. Organization of thinking is, naturally, of great importance to an animal, and so long as their models roughly approximate the facts, organization is usually more important than truth and logic, and prioritized accordingly. Heavily reinforced by the plethora of unknowns in the thinking organ’s subconscious and environment, snootiness about solutions could be crippling. The human thinking organ is designed to build viable models of reality comprised of a simulation of truths—beliefs. 98 percent of the time, the cognitive system’s operation is normative and descriptive, exactly how it does and should operate. But as I’ll show, in the other two, when one engages in more deliberative thinking, it’s potentially dangerous.  

 

A sentient thinking organ produced evolution is necessarily entangled with vestigial elements of a MULTITUDE of primitive ancestors, ensuring emotional (in addition to cognitive) bias and at least some lack of “consistent self” 

 

Evolution doesn’t integrate. It assimilates. It tends to add functions only to the extent to which it complements or enhances what’s already there. What was already there, prior to the rise of sentient-level intelligence, was necessarily primitive and “reflective.” The overwhelming majority of the burden of adjustment was on the sentient intellect, not the already-existing primitive cognition (see works of Johnathon Haidt). Optimal function depends on mutual coordination. The emotions can’t have too much involvement, nor too little. Many high-IQ sociopaths and psychopaths suffer from serious lapses in judgment due to a lack of emotions; those with “too much” suffer from an even more obvious set of problems. Ideal coordination is never realized.

 

“Adding on” is the essence of assimilation, like a condominium building that keeps retrofitting instead of rebuilding (like my own). Sometimes I say the brain is a chimeric thinking organ, a crude combination of the brains of many primitive ancestors. If you’re made up of many different animals, it’s hard to find consistent models of yourself—except by your lack of consistent self.

 

The thinking organ will almost certainly have to form the foundation of the psychology (including the intellect) during a specimen’s developmental years, when their logicality is limited  

 

An evolutionary process that creates a sentient reasoning organ follows the path of least resistance and only selects epistemic traits that are “just good enough to SURVIVE,” not to philosophize

 

For cognitive and emotional reasons, a person’s beliefs need to be at least reasonably compatible with their goals, motives, and circumstances; otherwise, their motivation, happiness, and relevant functionality are compromised. Being better at inferring truths does not always lead to more uplifting models of reality. Not all truths are useful for motivation—some can be rather harmful. But being designed for survival, the thinking organ is good—even if not perfect—at rationalizing when needed. Truths that can be harmful include the truth about society’s delusions. Survival over the past ten million years has depended on maintaining good standing in a pack’s hierarchy to gain sufficient access to resources and mates, and evolution acted accordingly.

 

Chief among these societal delusions is The Sham: the widespread delusion that rational human/anthropomorphic agency predominates society--that people make decisions way more rationally and objectively than is the case (or even possible), that the course of societal events is directed by individuals in power rather than its own natural evolution. Ensconced in highly Complex networks, individuals and organizations must maintain functional model coherence, which requires settling for comprehensible constructions of limited information. These “artificially coherent” models tend to be accepted as reality itself. The Sham is like society’s collective illusory freewill, and it’s just as cognitively and emotionally essential for group function—but not self-understanding or one’s understanding of Nature. 

 

Moreover, all else being close to equal, a smarter thinking organ is better at apprehending truths, but everything else close to equal, it’s also better at concocting packages of beliefs to protect themselves from truths they’d rather not be aware of.  All else being close to equal, a smarter and/or imaginative apparatus will identify more variables, but puzzles gain complexity highly nonlinearly as they grow. The number of possible combinations between the pieces—or number of ways variables can interact—increase multiplicatively, not additively. Nonlinear increases in complexity can easily outweigh increases in knowledge.  

 

 

Let me return to the question posed before the constraints’ introduction: desirability vs cost. Suppose you could engineer a thinking apparatus without an appended corrective infrastructure to fully contemplate truth without the capacity for delusion and circular reasoning--would you want to? Would it still be sentient?

 

Superhuman rationality would, of course, have benefits, but that doesn’t mean it outstrips the cost of restraining creativity, imagination, and, above all, whatever “cheating needs” the thinking apparatus has (not to mention that specimen don’t always have the luxury of being neurotic philosophers paralyzed by indecisiveness, especially within an evolutionary environment). Intensive thinking processes are rarely pretty. Science philosopher Micheal Streven posits that modern science is governed by what he calls “The iron rule of explanation”: sterile presentations of empirical evidence arrived upon by unreported processes entirely at the author’s discretion (see his The Knowledge Machine). This helps keep logic in check post hoc without unduly restraining the processes that make findings possible. Post hoc logicality has been spectacularly successful at producing results while suppressing the anarchic realities of discovery. Pseudo-rationalist delusions notwithstanding, scientific hypotheses aren’t manifestations of rationality—they’re rationalizations that might be correct. 

 

Thus, confining thinking to perfectly straight lines would render truly self-directed thinking impractical if not impossible. This is the epistemic duality: You can’t have the “good” without the “bad.”

 

 

More on the Cognitive System

 

Though the cognitive system and belief networks are as essential to modern human function as government and taxes are to a society of 330 million people, it’s no more infallible. Subconscious cognition twists related variables into causation-like relationships, creating an artificial seamlessness to cause and effect, even sometimes in total randomness. Secondly, it acts in real time and ex-post facto to reinforce and rationalize conclusions, emotions, behavior, goals, plans, decisions, and language, creating interconnected packages of conscious, transitory, and subconscious beliefs. It should, therefore, be assumed that the more a belief or model of reality deviates from the truth, the more beliefs and models that will come to support it will also deviate from it, including future beliefs and models, which can only be guessed. The packaging of beliefs and the reinforcement of the above with beliefs that, in turn, get reinforced leads to wrongness being a nonlinear feedback loop.  

 

Although avoiding wrongness is universally more important than correctness, it may not be essential for most people. However, the mentally ill are another matter. People most want to come to make judgments and decisions when in emotional states (anxiety, mania, depression, etc.)—which are also the worst time to make them. And it’s not just because it’s when one’s thinking is least reliable. Belief propagation through the network tends to be nonlinear. During emotional states, the “flux” of transitory beliefs is accelerated, giving them a better chance to “imprint” on the subconscious. Poor belief management leads to belief corruption and impulsive decision-making. A general habit of avoiding wrongness and suspending decisions as much as feasible prepares one for these states.

 

Below lists the costs of maintaining functional cognitive coherence:

Most fallacious reasoning; the causation bias, the assumption that causality will be ascertainable and satisfying, making ascertaining correctness seem easier than is the case; the tendency to blur observation and interpretation and jump to conclusions, making opinions seem more necessary than is the case; the fallacious linearization of reality that I call the linear illusion, that things tend to change linearly rather than nonlinearly, ultimately leading to blindness of Complexity discussed in part two; the tendency of wrongness to metastasize (which is nonlinear), making wrong beliefs, undesirable behavior, sloppy explanations, and premature decisions, goals, and planning more dangerous than believed; the tendency to underestimate the significance of the unknown information (the availability heuristic bias), leading (along with other factors) to the underestimation of the advantages of suspending decisions; ineptitude at probability and statistics (since the thinking organ’s programmed for causation, not correlation and randomness, which probability and stats are based on); the sociological manifestation of the linear illusion known as The Sham, the widespread delusion that rational human/anthropomorphic agency predominates society) confirmation bias; the hindsight bias (“I knew it all along” bias); the linear illusion, blindness to human nature and the way the World works; and in combination with an emergent psychology, what’s experienced as freewill--and with that, consciousness.   

 

It is only here where human social and emotional needs come into play, tremendously reinforcing them.

 

Looking from the list above: Human cognition, sociality, and emotionality are responsible for: Making ascertaining correct answers seem easier and less necessary than thought; wrong beliefs more dangerous; suspending decisions seem less beneficial.     

 

 

I arrive, as promised, back to Unwrongness. Many operate under the delusion that exaggerating the influences of the conscious mind beyond what’s needed for general resolve is the best means of augmenting self-agency. But it’s not just quantity, or perceived quantity, that matters. To ensure appropriate actions, gain more, and avoid losing it, you need to know how you have self-agency. One empowers the conscious with epistemic beliefs and disciplined belief management; and they avoid disempowering it with capricious opinions, sloppy model construction, bad behavior, and premature plans and goals.

 

Knowledge of the sentient duality is a hypothetical path to methods that empower self-agency enough for one’s intellectual beliefs to duly affect their behavior. If done well enough, a roughly anthropomorphic species could voluntarily act upon the right beliefs to live in relative harmony with their environment for an extended period of geologic time. This is unlikely to occur on Earth. And it’s especially unlikely to happen on Earth if everyone continues mismodeling every system of variables on Earth relevant to the POL.

 

As I hope you can see, a psychology and its beliefs can only be understood by holistic analysis: analysis of the whole, analysis that assumes neither parts nor whole can be understood just by looking at the parts; you have to see how they fit together. And holistic management requires treating the intellectual system and conscious beliefs as part of the psychology. Unfortunately, people analyze them and every system of variables in Nature reductively, or just by looking at the parts. Fortunately, large, unwieldy networks with interacting variables have been studied, and distinctive characteristics have been identified. The study of these networks is known as Complex systems theory, and ER has used it to unite psychologies, the POL, ecosystems, economies, and societies under a single set of laws. Extralogical Complexity is the basis of the third conceit.