Today's column takes us directly into the line of enquiry initiated with my previous post. (Politicsweb, 7 July) "From Tony Soprano to the ANC and beyond". I'll start by repeating briefly the motivation and theme of this series.
The world, despite a period of unparalleled prosperity and freedom, is facing multiple crises which threaten the dominance of prosperous peaceful democracies. In addition, economic and existential inequality is increasing globally, destabilising borderline democracies and encouraging the rise of authoritarian or criminalised regimes. Perhaps, most importantly, the rise of competing ideologies and political polarisation in the democratic West is weakening its ability to respond effectively to these multiple challenges.
Together with novel technologies and the interconnectedness of global society, these political-cultural challenges pose existential level threats at both global and regional scales. Partly in response to such threats, new and revolutionary lines of research, have sprung up which have hardly penetrated into the broader political realm.
These fears are hardly new or revolutionary. Some excerpts from the address of Arthur Schlesinger, writer, historian and advisor to President John Kennedy to the Institute of United States Studies of the University of London in 1997 make a similar point.
People of good will in 1900 believed in the inevitability of democracy, the invincibility of progress, the decency of human nature, and the coming reign of reason and peace...
Looking back, we recall a century marked a good deal less by love than by hate, irrationality, and atrocity, one that for a long dark passage inspired the gravest forebodings about the very survival of the human race. Democracy, striding confidently into the 1900s, found itself almost at once on the defensive...
A third of the way into the century, democracy seemed a helpless thing, spiritless, paralyzed, doomed. Contempt for democracy spread among elites and masses alike: contempt for parliamentary dithering, for "talking-shops," for liberties of expression and opposition, for bourgeois civility and cowardice, for pragmatic muddling through...
The political, economic, and moral failures of democracy had handed the initiative to totalitarianism. Something like this could happen again. If liberal democracy fails in the 21st century, as it failed in the twentieth, to construct a humane, prosperous, and peaceful world, it will invite the rise of alternative creeds apt to be based, like fascism and communism, on flight from freedom and surrender to authority.
The paper itself is worth reading in full, and Schlesinger is not alone. From Nick Bostrom1 to James Martin2 and other serious futurologists the future seems bleak - not only for democracy and freedom but for the very existence of the human species unless we learn enough about ourselves to make a difference in the real world.
The purpose of this series is to introduce recent new ideas and knowledge to a more general audience so as to widen the perspective of both citizens and politicians. Let's bring this down to earth with a simple metaphor, that of sports coaches and sports scientists. Nobody in their right minds would dream of handing over a first-rate professional sports team to a group of sports scientists no matter how brilliant.
A good professional coach is a special individual with a deep knowledge of the tiny but vital intricacies of the sport they are involved in. Almost certainly they have themselves played the sport at a high level. They have worked in their early years under other experienced coaches learning the tricks of the trade, absorbing firsthand the different style different coaches bring to the game.
Over these years they begin to formulate their own philosophy and strategies of leadership. They instinctively know which player to push, which to nurture which to hold in check. They learn to lead and work with a team of subspecialists, how to manage expectations, complacency and doubt and to respond to the psychological warfare conducted by rival coaches and media.
The great coach also brings a unique personality and insights to the game. They read and learn widely the history of the sport and adapt the lessons of the past and their rivals to the challenges of the present and future. They are irreplaceable.
But equally no coach in their right mind would ignore new research emerging from the sport scientist's laboratories. Rarely does the coach read the original technical papers which underlie the ideas and information they use in the exercise of their profession. They get the pre-digested information through pamphlets and newsletters, at meetings and conventions and a host of other intermediaries.
That is what this column is about. To bring new ideas and information to the attention of politicians and the public, bearing in mind that politics is infinitely more complex and the consequences of misjudgement are more terrible than a poor sporting performance.
This post is especially difficult to write for a number of reasons. Firstly, the material I'm going to report is weird and deeply counterintuitive, not in a 'gee whizz' kind of way but in a deeply technical, abstract and mathematical way3.
It is weird like Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics in which the technical details were only accessible to a limited number of people talented enough, motivated enough and trained enough to assimilate the material, albeit it with considerable effort.
But contrary to those brilliant advance in 20th century physics, the stuff I will introduce here impinges directly on the way all of us think about the world, the values we hold, our political opinions and the way we converse with others. In short, they impinge on our everyday lives and the way we face the challenges of our times.
Thirdly, I present myself neither as a technical expert or as a kind of guru. But I do have a scientific background and my aim is simpler: to show you that the way you thought you learnt about the world is profoundly wrong. But instead of that being a calamity our new comprehension of consciousness and perception opens up fresh ways of understanding ourselves and others and, most relevantly, of understanding politics in its broadest sense.
Make no mistake, the practice of politics and the emotions it arouses in people will continue as before. But to take the simple metaphor I used earlier, new knowledge allows a coach to look at his sport from fresh vantage points and devise strategies that will in the long run bring better results. In the political world that may make the difference between misery or catastrophe and survival and prosperity for tens of millions or billions of people.
I'll start by setting out the basic information and ideas and then take a look at the implications. The conceptual revolution round consciousness and mind has been created by a remarkably brilliant network of neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers and information theorists mostly over the past 2 decades. These are their working conclusions.
The way each of us 'see' the world is NOT built slowly over time from sensory inputs from the outside in. Rather it is built from the top down or, putting it another way, from the inside out.
More specifically, each one of us is born with a perceptual model of the world, appropriate to our evolutionary niche as an advanced social species with a uniquely complex brain, already lodged in our brains probably before birth. That model is altered over time, which we'll address later, and the iterative process of expectation-input signal-model adjustment is designed to keep us alive and thriving in the species-specific niche we occupy.
The model is designed for action and survival not for abstract truths and arcane moral values. These arise as strategic by-products of our complex social brains seeking optimal survival strategies by modifying and extending the conceptual model lodged in our brains.
Starting at the beginning, probably even in the uterus already, the foetus has in its brain a model of its internal and external world. This model is not the truth about the world but a sort of wish list of sensory inputs which meet the necessary conditions for the developing human's ability to survive and flourish. Perceived deviations from that preferred list of internal and external inputs provokes a response, some below the level of consciousness but some very much part of consciousness.
At the beginning, the model is simple and focuses mostly on the newborn's need for food (mother's milk), warmth, security - eg. sound of human voices - and internal states of metabolic and physical balance. Signals entering via the elaborate sensory system of the brain which indicate deviations from the expected (preferred) state of affairs elicit a reaction: agitated motor movements, crying, screaming etc, designed to alleviate the source of discomfort. If this does not work then eventually the infant may lapse into a quiet state so as not to attract predators and to conserve energy.
Assuming for a moment that the infant survives birth and early infancy, sensory systems directed to the outside (exteroceptive) begin to mature and so does the sensory apparatus focussed on the state of the body (interoceptive). The motor system also matures allowing for a wider range of responses. The brain too matures and its maturation process is determined by its experiences in the preceding phase.
As a result of these processes the so-called generative model lodged in the brain also evolves in accord with its (1) species-specific specifications, (2) the particular DNA template of the individual and (3) the range of previous experiences which have helped shape the continually evolving model.
Let's talk a bit more explicitly about the model. At first glance it could be conceptualised as a complex but wholly unconscious homeostatic system allowing the human system to remain within the bounds of optimal functioning. In some species that is precisely how it is.
But in the extraordinarily complex and diverse physical, conceptual, social and political niche occupied by the human species that does not suffice for the range of delicate and complex adjustments required by the human being to survive and reproduce.
For that to be optimised and for humans to adapt to changing circumstances consciousness is needed.
Over the particular evolutionary trajectory followed by the human species we developed a brain sufficiently large and complex to allow a level of information-processing to emerge which supports the appearance of consciousness. That is, a conscious model (not reality) is created in the human brain from birth or before which is equivalent to what we call 'mind'.
This mind includes physical features of the environment relevant to our niche but also social and other higher-order features which fall within the broad compass of human activity.
A key feature of the generative model (mind) in our heads is the idea of a self with a sense of continuity and agency; that is, the ability to choose which we call free will. This allows for the creation of a sense of personal history and the ability to learn from our past responses.
That is a lot to absorb. But the point being made is the following: that without a sense of autonomous selfhood and a personal historical narrative we could not have a sense of continuity, purpose, the capacity to learn from the past and the incentive to act effectively in the present.
To return to politics, the point of this post was to provide a new paradigm for understanding how humans, a complex social species occupying a special niche in the animal kingdom, can have so many different ways of perceiving and reacting to the world it inhabits.
Taking this further, politics is not about the actions of individuals. Politics is about the behaviour of collectives large or small, formal or informal, stable or unstable. All individuals act in 'contexts' created by the actions of collectives and in turn influence those 'contexts'.
These interactions between individuals, collectives and political-economic contexts are connected by multiple feedback loops creating a hierarchical complex system. Outside factors such as technology, ecological conditions, resource availability and interactions with global cultural currents also feed into the local and regional systems. Such systems persist until something changes the dynamics.
Central to all this are the contents and thus the choices made by individual humans minds. It's necessary at this point to address the question: is the distribution of minds purely randomly distributed in 'mind space', or are they clumped to some extent? To do so we need to consider the chief factors which could determine the clumping process.
In talking earlier about how minds are created in the first place we noted that they are species-specific (humans), individual-specific in terms of their genetic endowment, socialisation-specific which is partly random and partly according to family and socio-economic-educational status and, finally, culturally and historically determined.
Theoretically all of these factors contribute. Empirically there is evidence for all of them but I want to concentrate on the last of the simplified categories listed above, namely, the historical-cultural dimension.
Imagine for an instant a child growing up to mature adulthood in a so-called standard Danish home, a standard Afghanistan home, a standard San Franciscan home, a poor black South African home, a hunter-gatherer home in mid sub-Saharan Africa, a standard Chinese home ...etc, etc. It is impossible to think that either the perceptions or responses of a statistically relevant sample of such individuals wouldn't clump into different regions of mind-space.
And so the accumulating empirical evidence confirms. A considerable body of rigorous, high-level work from a set of disciplines linked to the core idea of evolutionary cultural anthropology confirms significant cross-cultural differences. A representative, but markedly abbreviated, list of such difference includes:
"... thinking styles (e.g. Masuda and Nisbett 2001, Nisbett and Miyamoto 2005), economic preferences (e.g. Gächter and Schulz 2016, Falk et al. 2018), personality structure (e.g. Smaldino et al. 2019) and moral judgements (e.g. Curtin et al. 2020, Awad et al. 2020), and furthermore demonstrated that WEIRD subjects often represent outliers."
In short, such samples differ from one another along many dimensions. All this and much other work besides has been done without reference to the main thrust of this post, namely, recent ideas around consciousness and mind. The fact that wholly independent lines of investigation confirm the predictions arising out of the work reported in this post considerably strengthens the claims of both.
To sum up: There are as many individual human consciousnesses (minds) in the world as there are humans. These start off with a more-or-less universal human model already lodged in our brains at or before birth. This universal model is a product of our special evolutionary trajectory and is designed to keep up alive and reproducing.
But in the course of our lifespan this model matures in individual and group-specific ways in considerable measure as a result of the feedback it receives in the course of its maturation process which continues until the end of our lives. This provides an updated conceptual framework for understanding the wildly different political and individuals behaviour of humans across the globe.
The picture I have outlined here is the product of a cumulative, multi-disciplinary scientific effort very much the equivalent of the revolutionary advances in physics in the 20th century. The questions it addresses are just as huge and important as its predecessors and its ultimate consequences are unknown at this early stage of its genesis.
But we're interested in the political impact of this new framework and that too is much too early to predict. Hopefully it will facilitate a more objectively rational approach to political analysis and mitigate the powerful subjective responses which drive moral outrage and identity politics. Already the physical core theory underlying the 'conscious mind' model has been extended in a series of mind-bending theoretical articles downwards to lower organisms and upwards to collectives and higher-level information-processing structures.
Certainly, I can't see such counterintuitive and weird ideas having much purchase on the everyday world of politics and human behavior at this stage. But the effect of radical innovations are over-estimated in the short-term but very much underestimated in the longer term.
In the course of this series of posts I want bring theory down to earth and explore real-life politics both in South Africa and globally bearing in mind the ideas presented here and, hopefully, in upcoming contributions to this column.
Mike Berger
Endnotes and some references
There is no systematic attempt here to provide even a representative reading list. My basic reference is the charming but difficult book by Anil Seth, Being You: a new science of consciousness. I've put in one technical article to give the interested reader an idea of the technical density of some of the key ideas underlying the emergent view of how we perceive and react to the world. Difficulty is no test of truth and I have in anycase constructed my own narrative with a general audience in mind and the focus on the political dimension. Time will tell whether I (and others) are talking nonsense or whether will contribute to our survival and flourishing
1. Nick Bostrom - Professor, University of Oxford and Director, Future of Humanity Institute. Radical philosopher studying human-AI potential and risk mitigation strategies
2. James Martin - Founder of the 21-st Century School at the University of Oxford and prolific author of amongst other books "The Meaning of the 21st Century"
3. Karl Friston et al - On Markov Blankets and Hierarchical Self Organisation, Journal Theoretical Biology 486, 2020 (In 2016 Friston was ranked No. 1 by Semantic Scholar in the list of top 10 most influential neuroscientists)
