Some Observation on Truth from Robert G. Ingersoll in time for the 2014 election

By Gary Berg-Cross

As you can probably tell, the flood of insincerity abroad in our politics. It’s a stunning mix of strange, false & brazenly cheesy with intrusive fear paralyzing ads to boot (note - Overall ad spending has broken $1 billion in federal elections and state governors’ races,according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP)). Of course there is plenty to fear with war, pestilence and poverty abroad in the land also along with "shady,deep-pocket dark money from the establishment that undermines what we call "Democracy." Indeed all these fears can get rolled into campaigns like Scott Brown who warns that ISIS might cross the border, and bring Ebola with them. All this conservative talk about things like "restoring the values of the Christian family" moves us away from reality.
 
Over 100 years ago Robert Ingersoll warned about message like this that use religious beliefs in hard times to impose faith-based values about morality and the like.  He recognized the methods of silencing people with alternate opinions and even denying the vote to those not favored by class or ethnicity.  His antidote, summarized in a booklet called “The Truth” (sometimes package with another pamphlet call Ghosts) was a dose of rationality and truth with ideas forged in the Enlightenment  after the “countless years” we had “groped and crawled and struggled and climbed and stumbled toward the light after being “hindered and delayed and deceived “  In Ingersoll’s time the foundation was given a boost by Darwin’s evidence-based theory of evolutions. So armed humanity seemed hungry for the facts and ready to accept Science as a benefactor.  Ingersoll’s apt observation was that:

 “Nothing is greater, nothing is of more importance, than to find amid the errors and darkness of this life, a shining truth. Truth is the intellectual wealth of the world. Truth is the mother of joy. Truth civilizes, ennobles, and purifies. The grandest ambition that can enter the soul is to know the truth.

Truth gives man the greatest power for good. Truth is sword and shield. It is the sacred light of the soul.

The man who finds a truth lights a torch.”

Like many Ingersoll would be disappointed to find so few of us with the right sword, shield or torch to spark our inner light of understanding and to speak honestly from deep conviction. Instead we are still under the say of politically correct belief buttressed by invisible ghosts of prejudiced conclusions that steals the truth from us like a mix of a tyrant and a beggar. There are just still too many factors, as Ingersoll observed, lingering from our primitive past  that hinder us from examining issues.

“Prejudice, egotism, hatred, contempt, disdain, are the enemies of truth and progress. .... all questions presented to his mind, without prejudice, -- unbiased by hatred or love -- by desire or fear.” 

Our political process and its allies tries to prevent open inquiry by “force or fear” which  is doing all it can to “degrade and enslave” us still.
In part we have not taken up with full enthusiasm the path to the truth - by investigation, experiment and reason.  We are still prey to a truth short-circuit of that self-controlled exploratory path. Open investigation of issues is still difficult and ill-supported with some topics too sensitive to discuss.  Instead we are swallowed by the dishonest propaganda of conventional and mainstream, politically correct thinking and truthiness. It comes mixed in with talking points and slogan that hide reality like a Wall Street insider.

A final thought is that those who can cut through the fog of politics to a better understanding have the obligation to reach out as Ingersoll did and communicate and to be a concerned citizen:

“If it be good for man to find the truth -- good for him to be intellectually honest and hospitable, then it is good for others to know the truths thus found.

Every man should have the courage to give his honest thought. This makes the finder and publisher of truth a public benefactor.

Those who prevent, or try to prevent, the expression of honest thought, are the foes of civilization -- the enemies of truth. Nothing can exceed the egotism and impudence of the man who claims the right to express his thought and denies the same right to others.

It will not do to say that certain ideas are sacred, and that man has not the right to investigate and test these ideas for himself."

”

And oh yes, vote your wisdom.

Cooperation, Sacred Values & Songs of Reason, Justice and Truth

By Gary Berg-Cross

To be sure the patterned form of communal behavior we call rituals are very human phenomena and belong in our social life. Rituals serve many symbolic roles such as an identity reminder as we celebrate the 4^th of July or a family birthday. Although artifactual they may help slate periodic human needs for a sense of meaning, belonging, history purpose, hope, love, forgiveness or gratitude. A collective ritualistic celebration like a Memorial Day parade brings historical traditions into ongoing life.

In many cultures the religious aspects of every event and act in life are often celebrated in ritual pattern such as a baptism. Religions have also developed some very specific patterns of public or private worship and celebration that exhibit devotion and commitment. Requiring Jews to walk to temple or Moslems to clean & pray on a rug pointed to Mecca a few times a day come to mind. Of course some big rituals are the religious ones that take place communally on places of worship like temples, churches and mosques.

Sociologists and anthropologists have long studied and theorized on these sorts of phenomena especially those using

synchronized or cooperative actions such as the kneeling, standing sitting sequences at a catholic mass.  The basic idea behind this was hypothesized a while ago by Emile Durkheim (The Sociology of Religion) who suggested that synchronized activities draw upon & enhance “intellectual” and “moral” conformity. By moving or vocalizing together as a unit (think Buddhist chanting), participants think of themselves as a unit. This firms up individuals as a unit and potential enriches their subsequent cooperation. That’s always useful if down the road it is “us against them” or a need to share water in drought etc.

Recently a range of laboratory experiments (for example Miles, et al 2009. The rhythm of rapport: interpersonal synchrony and social perception) have tested some of these ideas and have begun to offer some real evidence supporting this action/perception synchrony hypothesis. People investigate synchronous behaviors among pairs and find that partners who match each other’s postures, motions, and vocalizations tend to express higher levels of subjective liking, tend to sense enhanced oneness (we are a single entity) with others). We become more prosocial to others we partner with in this way as opposed to more passive and unvocalized pairings.  Behaviorally we tend to trust them more, seeing you and they as a unit and become more charitable towards them synchronous behavior partners, as in “pass the basket.”  Well actually researchers use what they call a public goods & charitable game where you make donations, but you get the point. One can see why organized religions would want to leverage this phenomena.

But there is another part of this group cooperation.  Durkheim hypothesized a sacred dimension in religious rituals affect cooperation.  Engaging in ritual reinforces a shared conceptions of the “sacred,” which he defined as “things set apart and forbidden” To test the hypothesis contemporary sociologists  operationalize this ideas “sacred values” as that a moral community treats as possessing transcendental significance.  That is they are just proclaimed as separate from secular values and hence can’t be compared to them or involved in a trade-off/balancing between the two types. In effect religious rituals help create a divide between the sacred and secular/profane domain. German researchers developing the following type of questions to identify if sacred values were involved in ritual activities:

“This activity is something that you cannot value in terms of money,”

“This activity is something that we should not sacrifice no matter how high the benefits,” and “This activity concerns things or values that are untouchable and should never be violated.”

Sure enough research (Fisher et al How Do Rituals Affect Cooperation? 2013) shows that feelings of belonging to a distinct and coherent group (one entity) intensify sacred values, which in turn increases cooperative behaviors in a public goods game.

So here we have religious synchronous ritual around some sacred concept producing people who feel more part of the ritual group and are more generous/prosocial.  This is part of what people think of as perhaps a good part of religion.  Is there something the secular community can learn from this?  Perhaps. 

We might more vigorously employ this very human part of us to generate prosocial behavior from synchronic secular rituals.  We have some, such as a moment of silence used in response to a national or international tragedy.  WASH did this in response to 9/11.

We have seasonal celebrations and Humanlight, but perhaps these lack agreed upon behaviors.  Free thinking humanists tend not to be conformists, so there is an issue there.

What about the sacred value component?  Well perhaps we can consider ideas from this research which suggests that non-religious groups might target special values such as rationalism, humanism, justice, democracy, truth, the scientific method, or beauty as of this kind.  I’m not sure we are ready to put that book of rational-humanist-justice songs together yet, but it might be fun to experiment.  After all we have a head start on prosocial behavior and society should be hearing from us.

Images

Ritual Ingredients chart: http://socrel.oxfordjournals.org/content/71/1/76/F3.expansion.html

Notes from the Humanist Strategy Wars and Sharing Humanist Values

By Gary Berg-Cross

In the free thinking community there are bound to be disputes and honest differences of opinion about difficult but important issues. Think of Aristotle and Plato or Newton and Leibnitz as detailed in the book Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World. (Or Stephan Jay Gould and most evolutionary theorists). Just because gifted people think on an issue, doesn’t mean there will be an easy convergence. Paul Kurtz and Richard Dawkins may agree on many scientific things and taking an atheist stance. But they may not agree on the tactics of keeping up community momentum & the vision needed to build toward a less faith-centric world. Dawkins as a representative of the New Atheists, believes that religion writ large tends to fundamentalism that is so radically absolutist, anti-intellectual and uncompromising that it is extremely harmful. In reaction the strategy is that religion must be publicly discredited and opposed for the good of society. This side of freethinking takes a confrontational approach and is contrasted with what was called the "don't rock the boat” crowd in an earlier article on this Blog. The New Atheist side has been presented on the blog recently, but less about the alternative has been blogged here, so I thought I would jot down a few things drawing on Paul Kurtz’s earlier writing.

Kurtz’s position reflects a less confrontational style and his concerns about a strident approach were evident in a 2010 Buffalo News interview. In that interview he deplored a hot focus on attacking religion. The worry is that it might come at the expense of other broader humanists goals (such as articulated in the NEO-HUMANIST STATEMENT OF SECULAR PRINCIPLES AND VALUES: PERSONAL, PROGRESSIVE, AND PLANETARY)

"It's become fixated in recent years on atheism, the criticism of religion," ..And I think that's a strategic blunder. Not just a strategic blunder, but a philosophical and ethical one, as well…. Let's say the atheists are successful, and religion continues to decline, so what do you have, a vacuum?" …. "That's really the burning issue in America today: How shall I live? What should I strive for?"

Kurtz, unlike the New Atheists, sees a place for believers in the broad spectrum of secular humanism for some time. It’s just a practical consideration of how society may evolve in manageable steps. Without a working agreement on some shared values for the common good any movement toward a more humanist societies (based on humanist principles as linked to above, rather than faith) will go nowhere. We might hope that enough of us share core values, although some express these in religious forms and others in human terms.  Then if so we can move ahead on some things and iron out wrinkles from old thinking as we progress. This is perhaps the idea developed somewhat in Robert Wright's (at times confusing) book, THE EVOLUTION OF GOD. Why do people believe in a figurative concept like God and Religion? One useful view of God is as a concept, like a cultural tool, that people use for various purposes such as to discuss and justify values. Such a belief is not a matter of truth grounded in external reality, but one of a concept that serves a purpose. Kurtz developed this view in his 1958 article "Functionalism and the Justification of Religion" (a book chapter in In Defense of Secular Humanism ).

We get a sense of this functional role of the God concept from the still familiar old style God/Religion Biblical concepts crafted in the Bronze Age. The guiding principles could be  pretty harsh (such as an eye for an eye and an Old Testament God that is vain and vengeful) but could be useful tribally. Common concepts holds tribes together. They helped provide a way of life and serve more as artistic justifications of things than scientific. Our standards for justification has changed but fundamentalists still find value in them, while some humanist's strategy is to continue and speed up  the evolution of the ideas and provide alternative tools.

So the argument is that if the attack on these old, unevolved concepts is just one of scientific truth, it misses the larger role that concepts play in giving meaning to people’s lives. Such old concepts are used in the sense that they ought to be true rather than are true. But in this way we might say that some humanist concepts will appeal to religious people who will see that they ought to be true and provide increased benefits. Evolved principles should replace and might the older concepts by substituting for their functional value. Framed this way the idea is to not just attack the "truth" of an idea, but to work on making others believe in humanist evolved values. This is one group's strategy for adapting some figurative concepts (and their implied values) over time. It’s happened before as the “love thy neighbor” addition found in Christian writing evolved in top of the earlier Jewish writings. Caring for one’s neighbor is a good concept to believe in and a value to share with others. Viewed as a humanist ideas may help evolve figurative religious culture. One view of the reality of the situation was expressed this way:

"Religion will be the medium by which people express their values for a long time to come, so it's important to understand what brings out the best and the worst in it." Robert Wright

Image Credits:

Paul Kurtz: http://peruhumanaratio.blogspot.com/

Video of Kahneman Talk on Knowing along with some Notes.

By Gary Berg-Cross

2002 Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman delivered the 12th Annual Sackler Lecture recently. See my earlier Blog on this.  Some interested parties may have missed this talk entitled "Thinking that We Know". You can see a review of the talk as well as a video of the entire thing at the NYT Review. If you don’t have time for that, the following are some notes from the hour lecture which touched on topics from his recent book (“Thinking, Fast and Slow”).

Kahneman started off in a commonsense philosophical manner talking about knowing. To know implies absence of doubt and true belief. But truth is a philosophical concept, and people disagree about what is true. There’s scientific truth that comes from a shared search for agreed and objective truth. This is the central mission of science. But in science just any belief is not part of the conception. It is possible for “true believers “ not to accept science as the way to truth. They argue that since some belief is central to science therefore it is just another religion.

We need to recognize this gap in ideas of knowing.

As a psychologist a starting point for Kahneman was a discussion of what we have learned from Psychology devised laboratory paradigms of reasoning, especially in natural/social environments.

Here he discussed 'dual-process' model of the brain & theories of reasoning . This is the distinction between 2 types of reasoning systems -  ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’ processes.

System 1 is an older and FAST form of universal cognition shared between animals and humans. It is probably actually not a single system but a set of subsystems that operate with some autonomy. System 1 includes what people call instinctive or intuitive knowing and behaviors. Kahneman and others like to System 1 processes as those that are formed by associate learning ((associative memory is often called instinctive). They are probably the kind produced by neural networks. System 1 processes are characterized as rapid, parallel and automatic in nature and usually only their resulting product becomes consciousness in humans.

System 2 In contrast is a more recent evolutionary development and is often called deliberate. It is slow and sequential in nature, takes effort (cognitive resources). K asks "What is 13 x 27?" System 2 makes use of the central working memory system. This leads to 2 different ideas of rationality. we apprehend the world in two radically opposed ways, employing two fundamentally different modes of thought – fast and slow.

Kahneman’s earliest study was mentioned in the NAS president’s introduction and Karhneman cites it as evidence of System 2 thinking. Pupils dilate when we engage in deliberately thinking. Yes the eyes are the windows into the mind!

While we like to think of ourselves as deliberate thinkers we are often associative thinkers. But to be fast we think that networks of associations need to be activated. These are not necessarily logical and they provide some quick but biased interpretations and are afforded by other associations. This makes for a Blink knowing, but often a deceptive one.

Take an association to the work “bank” in "approach the bank". A quick interpretation might select a meaning by frequency of use. Then "approach the bank" means going towards a financial institution rather than a river bank. It could also be primed by a related word so if we hear “fish” and “bank” then river is a more likely association.
You’ll have to see the video to see how Kahneman woos the audience with his story about his wife’s phrase "sexy man" and what he felt he knew she said afterwards as “doesn't undress the maid himself.”

As shown by studies associative memory interprets the present in terms of the past. In effect we produces stories that make sense based on these past associations (“sexy and “undress” are related). A good story makes associative sense. And this happens on stock market. It’s not deliberate reasoning but sloppy associative. Stats for atctual analysis of the performance of fund managers over the longer term shows that investors do just as well when basing financial decisions to a monkey throwing darts at a board. There is a tremendously powerful illusion of expertise that sustains managers in their belief their results, when good, are the result of skill. Kahneman explains this as a bias and thus "performance bonuses" are largely awarded for luck or stacking the deck and not real skill at projecting the future.

At this point K started citing studies showing how our interpretations of the likelihood of things is often not logical. What is the overall probability of a flood in California. People say small. Bit if asked the probability of a Flood from an earthquake in CA, the probability is higher, even though the probability of such things such be part of the first probability. Why the illogic? It’s just a better story.

At this point K moved to the topic of what is a valid argument? Truth and validity get confused as shown in the example below”

• All roses are Flowers
• Some Flowers fade quickly

· Therefore some Roes fade…..while that seems possible it is not logically true.

This shows that we reason by associations back from conclusion. Correct order is important for valid inference but not associations.

Kahneman provided some examples on the synergy of associations and how the environment influences what we think. If you hold a pencil between your teeth, forcing your mouth into the shape of a smile, you'll find a cartoon funnier than if you hold the pencil pointing forward, by pursing your lips round it in a frown-inducing way you feel more disgust for the cartoon. K had fun with this story. See also Timothy D Wilson’s book Strangers to Ourselves.

Associative coherence and emotion work differently than logical coherence. For emotions that have fit and adhere. This is suggested by a Paul Rozin’s poison experiment (Rozin et al. 1990). In Rozin’s experiment participants are shown 2 empty bottles that are subsequently filled with sugar. The experimenter then shows the participant two labels, one saying ‘Sugar’, the other saying ‘Sodium Cyanide.’ After reading the labels, participants are more hesitant to drink from the bottle with the ‘Sodium Cyanide’ label even it has OJ in it. There is associaton-based discomfort with.

And associations with particular people works strongly too. What we associate with a person has a great deal with how we believe and how we feel.
Most ideas come from people we like. That is a social belief comes from emotional trust.

K mentioned AmosTversky’s socialcultural theory of attitudes. Social leaders may have attitudes on certain topics for arbitrary historical reason. But as likeable leaders they often can influence many attitudes.

Interactions between System 1 and 2 was a big part of K’s talk.

System 2 is used for control and may follow a series of rules. It partially monitors system 1. How it works is shown by the classic math problem: A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Your intuitive system for association may quickly tell you that the ball costs 10 cents. That would be an easy solution, but it would also be incorrect but it is the choice of may even at MIT. Why? We are cognitively lazy. People who delay gratification as shown by a Psych test and have more self control do better on this type of problem. It is more System 1 control.

Scientists should be big System 2. After all they have to pass hostile reviews to get published.

Kahneman says one of his favorite examples of System 1 thinking is what happens when you hear an upper-class British voice say, "I have large tattoos all down my back. People who speak with an upper-class British accent don't have large tattoos down their back. It violates our associative knowledge. So the brain must be bringing vast world knowledge to registers that there is an incongruity here. It happens within three- or four-tenths of a second and it's the same response you'd get if you heard a male voice say, "I believe I am pregnant."

So association makes us ready to respond, but it comes with rigid expectations. An example was hearing that “Julie reads in year 4.
Then you get asked “What's here GPA?” Usually it is high.
It’s as if we have a distribution for each (GPA and reading) which gets mapped together. But there are too many intervening events to accurately predict this.

An example concerns airport insurance. During [the ’90s] when there was terrorist activity in Thailand, people were asked how much they’d pay for a travel-insurance policy that pays $100,000 in case of death for any reason. Others were asked how much they’d pay for a policy that pays $100,000 for death in a terrorist act. Turns out that people will pay more for the second, even though it’s less likely. Why” It’s a policy for an instance of terror vs. dying in general.
We pay more to the terror policy since we fear terror more than death.

this suggests that our associate story telling system 1 is usually in charge.
We like stories and how they sound. If we hear “woes unite foes” it is more persuasive aphorism than “Woes unite enemies.”

A lesson is to communicate to non-experts in a different way. Speak to their story with assoc coherence. This is a lesson for getting the Climate Change story understood. Also the source of the message has to be liked and trusted.
Global warming too distant and abstract so it will take trusted leaders to make the case and do it in associative language. Anecdotes are concrete and specific so they are preferred over facts.