Common Sense and Common Nonsense A Conversation about Mental Attitudes, Science, and Society Daniel S. Levine Common Sense and Common Nonsense A Conversation about Mental Attitudes, Science, and Society Daniel S. Levine Published by Mavs Open Press Arlington, Texas ©2018 common sense and common nonsense Publication Info Mavs Open Press Arlington, Texas https://uta.pressbooks.pub/ © 2018 Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data Common sense and common nonsense: a conversation about mental attitudes, science, and society / Daniel S. Levine. p. cm. First edition ISBN: 978-0-8998-8783-0 (ebook) 1. Cognition. 2. Cognitive neuroscience. 3. Commonsense. 4. Technology – sociological aspects. Legal Notice This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License. ID Number ISBN: 978-0-8998-8783-0 (ebook) page ii common sense and common nonsense Contents Table of Contents . iii Preface 2018 . .v Acknowledgments . vii Preface 1998 . ix Part 1: Human Nature and Its Paradoxes . 1 Chapter 1: Beliefs Matter! 3 Chapter 2: Neural Networks:Not Just Clever Computers 15 Chapter 3: What Do People Really Want? 23 Chapter 4: Actuality versus Optimality 35 Part2: Cognitive Approaches to Self-Actualization . 45 Chapter 5: How We Make Categories and Constructs 47 Chapter 6: Remaining Open to Change 57 Chapter 7: Negotiating Cognitive Dissonance 67 Chapter 8: Self-Actualization as Creative Synthesis 81 Chapter 9: Therapy, for the Person and Society 93 Part 3: Where Can We Take Our Wisdom? . 107 Chapter 10: What You Get is More thanWhat You See 109 Chapter 11: Brain Science for Humanity 125 Chapter 12: The Compassionate Revolution 135 Glossary . .151 Notes . 160 Bibliography . 169 Index. .181 Table of conTenTs page iii common sense and common nonsense page iv common sense and common nonsense Preface 2018 ommon SenSe and Common Nonsense (subtitle: science, social science, religion, politics, psychother- A Conversation about Mental Attitudes, Science, apy, literature, and economics, and the interrelation- Cand Society) was written in 1998 as an inquiry ships and analogies between these pursuits. It is less into the ways scientific understanding could further like an academic treatise and more like a conversation. cooperation, democracy, and peace on the planet. I In fact, the book anticipated how the word “conversa- was convinced that recent advances in neuroscience, tion” has come to be used by the media and other or- psychology, and my own field of neural networks could ganizations in the 2010s. The word has expanded from spawn advances in our understanding of how humans its original meaning of talk between a few people to think and act. Science supported some of our accu- mean a broad-based, exploratory, yet focused dialogue mulated social knowledge; that is the common sense about a problem needing to be solved, as in “we need of the book’s title. Yet science refuted other parts of to have a conversation about race relations.” our conventional wisdom; that is the title’s common How much of the book needs to be updated? nonsense. For various reasons, including the intellec- Now the reader will ask: how many of the conclu- tual and social climate of the time, the book was not sions I drew twenty years ago are still valid? published in the 1990s. The short answer is, my beliefs about human While scientific advances about brain and mind conduct and thinking habits—the “bullets” in Chapter have accelerated since 1998, the mission of using this 1 and the “bumper sticker statements” in Chapter scientific project to improve society has somewhat 1—have not changed over the years. The scientific fallen off the radar. News articles about advances in knowledge base supporting those beliefs has been brain science tend to focus on other possible appli- updated considerably by novel research findings, some cations, such as artificial intelligence and treatment of them widely known. Yet the more recent findings if for neurological and psychiatric disorders. Yet the anything strengthen the conceptual arguments based world has become ever more risky, and changes in on earlier findings. consciousness are still urgently needed to deal with it. For example, parts of Chapters 1, 3, and 6 discuss If anything, the climate for a book like mine is more the close connections in the human brain between favorable now than it was in the 1990s. Back then the emotion and cognition, particularly citing the work neoliberal consensus of global capitalism was widely of Antonio Damasio, Walle Nauta, and Paul MacLean. thought to be running smoothly and leading us all The mutual influence between emotion and cognition toward greater prosperity. In this century, recessions, is now generally accepted both by neuroscientists and rising economic inequality, and global climate change cognitive psychologists. It has been studied systemat- have all increased skepticism toward the prevailing ically in the more recent work of Luiz Pessoa and his order. This has made an increasing number of people, colleagues, who particularly note that no part of the young people especially, receptive to thinking “outside brain should be considered “emotional” or “cognitive” the box”—or even ignoring the box completely! to the exclusion of the other1. The style of the book is informal; at times it is For another neuroscience example, Chapter playful, at other times admonitory. Its focus ranges 3 discusses neural bases for the emotional and over many different human pursuits including natural cognitive aspects of empathy. Our knowledge of preface 2018 page v common sense and common nonsense the neuroscience of empathy has been advanced by functions in those tasks is considerably greater than it the late-1990s discovery of mirror neurons in both was in 19987. Some of these results have been incorpo- monkey and human brains. These are brain cells that rated in computational neural network models8. In the become active when an organism is doing something next generation, those of us who develop these compu- but also when the organism is observing someone tational models hope they may become applicable to else doing the same thing2. Also, recent results about the interpersonal and societal phenomena described the hormone oxytocin, originally found in relation to in this book, and thereby lead to more detailed rec- maternal functions, has strengthened the belief that ommendations for conduct that supports cooperative humans like other mammals are wired for caring3. interactions. Chapter 8 of this book discusses the needs each of us has for bonding with others and promoting What Does this Book Really Say? others’ welfare in addition to needs for our own The book supports the viewpoint that human material prosperity. Since 1998, several scientists have nature and our brain organization makes a genuinely written books about our social needs and instincts, cooperative world possible, but far from inevitable. It the attendant emotions and cognitions, and the refutes beliefs that we are doomed to war, poverty, and intricate brain pathways involved in these connec- tribalism because our nature is too competitive. tions, including Jaak Panksepp, Shelley Taylor, and The book’s review of neuroscience and psychology Matthew Lieberman4. All of this scientific work, like data supports the general notion that the different my book, argues against social policies that assume parts of our psychological nature—reason, emotion, the caricatured “economic man” who is driven only by and habit—all need to be valued if we want to have self-interest. meaningful lives and treat each other well. Elsewhere In experimental psychology, ever more data has I have discussed the harmful consequences for society emerged about the gap discussed in Chapter 1 and of regarding reason as separate from, and superior to, Chapters 9-11 between rational norms for judgment emotion, and thereby demonizing our deepest desires9. and decision making and the way people make Parts of Chapters 1, 4, and 9 of this book discuss judgments and decisions in real life. A 2011 book by how living in a democratic society is best served by economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explains “democracy” between the different parts of our minds this gap as an interplay in our minds between two and brains, meaning that no part of our mind or brain systems for fast and slow thinking5. Kahneman rules over the others. describes much decision making by the acronym The book advocates looking for alternative models WYSIATI for “what you see is all that is,” meaning of society armed with the wisdom that neuroscience that humans often decide on the basis of superficially and psychology bring us. In Chapter 9 it discusses the presented information and ignore the unpresented im- usefulness of ideas from fictional utopias and real-life plications of what they see. My book in several places intentional communities, noting that utopian litera- counteracts WYSIATI by the injunction “what you get ture has gone out of fashion and needs to be revived. is more than what you see.” The book also advocates a Aspects of a possible future cooperative world, and its “what you get is more than what you see” approach to implications for economics, politics, family, sex, work, judging other people by the decisions they make. That and recreation, are outlined in the book’s last chapter is, a person who makes counterproductive decisions entitled The Compassionate Revolution (Chapter 12). in one context with one set of incentives could easily I argue that our brains, and our newfound knowledge make better decisions in a different context or with a of how they act, makes such a world possible but don’t different set of incentives. This outlook anticipated predict how likely it is to happen. I agree with Daniel the widely read 2008 book Nudge by Richard Thaler, Kahneman that accurate prediction of the future is another economics Nobel laureate, and the legal only possible in simple systems with relatively little scholar Cass Sunstein6.