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 the influences of the intellect isn’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 Unwrongness. Any self-aware thinking apparatus, engineered or evolutionary, will not merely be fallibly self-aware, but inherently self-delusion. If produced by evolution, cognitive and emotional constraints will ensure it’s more delusional. The foundation of self-understanding is awareness of self-delusion, secondarily factual knowledge of self. While rational human agency, personal and societal, will always be greatly limited, one’s agency can be empowered by Unwrongness, accelerating their journey toward enlightenment and viable solutions to the POL. 

 

 

 

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. 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. Add those found in a product of evolution and it will be delusional than aware. 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 human fashion themselves.

 

Humans are more intelligent than logical, and overestimation of the correlation among individuals is rampant. Among other things, humans are designed for extra-logical, not logical, 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 an evolutionary process, 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.   

                                        

 

The Universal Laws of Sentient Duality

 

 

A thinking apparatus can’t have the capacity to directly contemplate truth without the capacity to be wrong, illogical, and delusional—the law of truth

 

Deductive or pure logic isn’t the study of truth: It’s the study and analysis of the thought process; it takes the truth of the premises for granted. Any thinking apparatus--thinking organ, brain--capable of directly contemplating truth and fully comprehending the rules of arithmetic must be able to think outside the bounds of pure or deductive logic. It must be able to think extra-logically. Just as statistics only directly establishes correlation, not causation, deductive logic only establishes the validity or invalidity of a thought process. 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 thinking apparatus can’t directly contemplate truth nor possess consciousness or a full comprehension of mathematics without the capacity to engage in circular reasoning—the law of circular reasoning

 

Godel’s first incompleteness theorem says that there are true arithmetic statements that are unprovable. The second incompleteness theorem says that no effective and consistent mathematical system can prove its own consistency. This effectively means that any remotely powerful logical system (like mathematics generally) will have at least some inherent self-reference, or rules merely assumed true and/or justified by other rules. Circular reasoning is at least an evolutionary simulation of self-reference (like pity is a simulation of empathy).

 

Consciousness, in turn, is a referential connection to self. “I think; therefore, I am” is almost the same thing as saying “I am; therefore, I am.” As I’ll discuss in the next heading, truth can’t be evaluated 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. And if the thinking organ has a subconscious and is more than the sum of its parts, which seem virtually certain, the thinking organ 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, an idea pops up, 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 thinking, approximating how most learning machines operate. Thought processes need context and relevance; simply running logical sequence randomly is exactly that. An iterative thought process does not need to “beg the question,” where the conclusion is the first 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.    

 

A thinking apparatus can’t contemplate truth without preferred beliefs—the law of logical bias

 

Since deductive logic can’t directly contemplate truth, it must rely on a source for premises, necessitating a previously established system of beliefs. The immediate and general function of the thinking apparatus depends on the system’s correctness, whose function also depends on it. Consistent truths enhance it; inconsistent ones impair it. This creates the first adhditional criterion for beliefs aside from consistency with reality and a preference for beliefs. ER calls this the law of logical bias.

 

This system of beliefs is a collection of the components of the apparatus’s models of “all reality” –internal and external. This can be modeled as a psychology. 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 (at least in the absence of improvement management). This makes knowledge and the POL self-biasing, even if improved management can easily outstrip it.     

 

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

 

The sentient psychology’s most powerful components will almost certainly be the least understood, and the most understood will be among the least powerful: In addition to TANGIBLE subconscious components (i.e., neurons or equivalents), the psychology’s foundation will probably be a Complex emergence, making one’s belief system largely unknowable. 

 

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).

 

Consider a system of 26 highly interactive but still independent variables/parts/or subsystems, A-Z. They could be anything from businesses in an economy to lifeforms in a biosphere to, in this case, the cells of a thinking organ. Just as you might interact differently with someone depending on the others present, how two variables interact is often influenced by the other variables they’re connected to. The total number of possible interactions grows nonlinearly faster than the number of variables due to what’s called combinatorial explosion: ten variables undergo over a thousand possible interactions; eleven over two thousand; twenty a million; thirty a billion. Effects between variables N and M “reverberate” up, down, and back the alphabet, allowing them to vastly outgrow initiating events. As the system grows, it will tend to become progressively more dominated by these indirect, “oscillatory” effects. Collectively, they give rise to a Complex emergence: a self-organized system unpredictably different and more powerful than the sum of its parts. This system is approximately equal to the network’s synergy.   

 

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 grow nonlinearly. A conscious-mind dominant, top-down thinking apparatus could never control and manage all these oscillatory effects—and they’re absolutely required. Nonlinear feedback generates the synergy that drives a high-functioning thinking apparatus and the “self-referential loops” required for consciousness and its accompanying perception of control. Consciousness, as said, is a recognition as well as reference to self. 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.   

 

An engineering, or even evolutionary, process could drastically reduce nonconscious dominance by having more thinking cells and increasing the strength/reliability of signals between them, among other hypothetical measures. But inevitably, power and consciousness will tend to make the emergence disproportionally more powerful, preventing a conscious dominate, extra-logical thinking apparatus.  

 

The thinking organ, therefore, must obey what ER calls the law of Complex synergy: From the tangible component’s interacting known, unknown, and unidentifiable variables, a self-organizing system emerges that’s unpredictably different and more powerful than the sum of its parts, making the most powerful components the least understood. As will be explained in the third conceit, this phenomenon applies to virtually all of Nature’s most important networks, from ecosystems to economies to psychologies; and it couldn’t exist as it does without the “bootstrapping effects” that allow phenomena to emerge from randomness and self-organize.

 

A psychology can be modeled as a substrate (or parts) comprised of beliefs and a system that represents one’s emergent understanding of all reality (internal and external). Like any understanding, it is more than the sum of the parts. To whatever extent beliefs can be distinguished from understanding, subconscious beliefs will be the least known, conscious one’s the most--resulting in 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 every change in one’s 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 law of self-referential bias  

 

The puzzle of life is unique in that one’s solution is part of the puzzle, making is self-biasing. A consequence of the law of Complex synergy is that any nontrivial changes in the parts makes the network more emergent, ensuring Complexity increases faster than comprehension. Interactions increase nonlinearly, and how variables interact depend on the others they interact with. Unknowns are 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 sanity—more than improves it, at least in the near, if not, long term.     

 

A thinking apparatus (without an appended referential library created by an

outside source) can’t directly 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 infcrease 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 no, 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. Naturally, in intensive thinking, this approximate process is executed iteratively until inferences are drawn.

 

If the thinking apparatus is--and must be--subconscious-dominant, this is the only way extra-logical reasoning can be conducted and, therefore, the only way a self-aware thinking apparatus can 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.   

 

An extra-logical reasoning 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 through the agency of what ER calls artificial Resonance, which creates resonant perceptions of reality. To avoid a perceived reality with disjointed thoughts and physical perceptions, it 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, Resonance is “automated” cognition/thinking. 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, Resonance’s function was inevitably assimilated into reasoning, ensuring a host of epistemic flaws (Resonance will be explained in greater detail later)

 

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 approximates the facts, organization is usually more important than truth and logic, and is 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 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.  

 

In fact, this could apply to an engineered system, as well. Knowledge of more variables/pieces makes the puzzle of life nonlinearly more Complex, which can be crudely shown using simple permutations to calculate the total number of interactions between variables. Greater knowledge by no means guarantees better understanding or thinking.

 

A self-aware 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 an extra-logical 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 evolutionary acted accordingly.

 

Chief among these societal delusions is The Sham: the widespread con/delusion that rational human 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. 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 being close to equal, it’s also better at concocting packages of beliefs to protect themselves for truths they’d rather not be aware of.  The epistemic duality: You can’t have the “good” without the “bad.”

 

 

More on Artificial Resonance

 

Though Resonance 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. Resonance 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 (transitory beliefs represent things like gut reactions and raw emotions). 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.

 

Resonance leads to:

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 confirmation bias; the hindsight bias (“I knew it all along” bias); the sociological manifestation of the linear illusion known as The Sham, the widespread con/delusion that rational human agency predominates society (that people make decisions, or are capable of making decisions, way more rationally and objectively than is the case, that the course of societal events are directed by individuals in power rather than its own natural evolution), creating 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: Resonance and human 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 effect their behavior. If done well enough, a roughly anthropomorphic species could both obtain and 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 to completely mismodel every system of variables on Earth relevant to the POL, from psychologies to economies to ecosystems.

 

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. 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, and Nature’s other major systems under a single set of laws. Extralogical Complexity is the basis of the third conceit.