The Social Brain

Where is your mind? Is it in your head? Well, that’s where your brain is — and your brain remembers, plans, makes judgments, solves problems… but you also use other things to remember and plan, like your phone or a notebook. You solve problems and make judgments with all sorts of other tools and resources, too. The more you think about it, the more you realize that while the brain is a squishy lump of fat and protein, the mind is something much larger: it’s an ever-expanding organ of tissue, wood, stone, and steel. And people. Because of communication, we can even make other people extensions of our minds. We can access their memories and knowledge by simply asking.

I don’t need to learn how to fix a car, practice medicine, or vulcanize rubber. Other people do that for me, just as I do things for them. We are a species of individuals that is also one big interdependent growth, a blend of flesh and concrete. A ‘techno sapien’ powered by imaginations and passions made real by a faculty we call reason. Reason guides us to truer knowledge and better decisions. It’s allowed us to increase life expectancy, suffer less, and work together better. It’s bound to take us further and higher until the end of time. Or is it?

The organ we use to reason takes millions of years to evolve, but the fruits of reason grow rapidly and are ever accelerating. In the next four decades, we’re expected to build the equivalent of another New York City every month. More concrete was installed in the last two decades outside the US than the US installed during the entire 20th century. This growth means that quality of life around the world is rising, with more electricity, manufactured goods, food, comfort, and transportation becoming more accessible. But there are hints that reason and logic are struggling against the complexity of it all; against our growing dependence on the things we’ve built and their unintended consequences.

Nearly every part of life today involves or relies on processes that release molecules with lopsided electrical charges. This property causes them to absorb and re-emit thermal radiation, slowing its escape into space. More warmer parcels of air mean stronger weather events. They can’t be pinned on any particular extreme storm, but they make extreme storms in general more extreme and frequent. What’s at stake isn’t just bad weather; it’s disaster: more lives lost, more property lost, more droughts, more hunger, more famine, more people needing refuge, and an even greater reliance on the very things that caused the problems in the first place.

We release about 51 billion tons of such gases every year, and we need to release zero. But how do you rethink everything? Who gets to direct the costs and tradeoffs? How do you achieve collaboration between nearly every local and national government when what works in one place won’t work everywhere, when decisions affect jobs in one place and food in another? When not just things need to be rethought, but also habits, traditions, and values? How do you achieve consensus when a problem isn’t obvious to the senses, is far away in space and time, requires solutions that affect people in different ways, and always carries some uncertainty?

The philosopher Timothy Morton calls something so massively distributed in time and space and so viscous, so sticky that it adheres to all that touch it, a hyperobject. Every civilization that grows at the speed of reason must at some point face hyperobjects. The fact that we still haven’t found evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth has been brought up as evidence that some sort of great filter might exist that few civilizations manage to get past. That a hyperobject like our impact on the planet might be such a great filter is not a new idea. What it’ll take to solve it is the topic of Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. I decided to do this video in partnership with him and his team because the way we deal with hyperobjects reveals a lot about the mind.

It’s easy to think that we would all be better off if everyone was just more rational. But what if reasoning wasn’t built for what we’ve become? Let’s begin by looking at behavioral inertia. Behavioral inertia is the tendency to keep doing what you’re already doing — status quo bias. It can be a frustrating bias if you desire change, but its origin isn’t a flaw. If an organism has managed to survive long enough to reproduce and care for its offspring, then the state of its world was sufficient for its genes to spread. That’s all it takes to persist. The types of organisms we see around us will naturally be those that managed to persist and didn’t, after reaching the point at which they could persist, rock the boat too much. Behavioral inertia can help slow down the accumulation of unintended consequences and the loss of ideas that work, but it can also slow down innovation and adaptation.

If the environmental impacts of our society were more immediate and unignorable, it wouldn’t be so tempting to apply this inertial brake. But emissions are invisible, and their consequences aren’t immediate or local. They impact future people and people far away — those who are different from us, poorer than us, people we will never meet. This may be one of the first challenges advancing civilizations face: wielding not just the power of technology and distributed cognition, but also the responsibilities. Extending not just the mind but also empathy could certainly be a great filter. Our lower instincts may bias us, but surely reason can help us navigate towards the future we want, right?

Well, what is reason? It’s a way of making inferences. An inference is any new information extracted from the information you already have. We make inferences all the time — every living thing does. We don’t have measuring-tape tentacles that shoot from our eyes, and what actually enters our brain is just a 2D image, but our brains nonetheless infer depth by attending to cues like stereopsis, occlusion, perspective, parallax, size… When this happens, we accept it as reality. We aren’t aware of the visual processing that made it possible and don’t have to be. If, however, we do consciously consider why a certain conclusion was reached, then boom, that’s reasoning.

Reasoning is the process of making inferences not automatically and instinctively, but by looking at facts and seeing what conclusion they support. When Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth to within a percentage or two of the value accepted today, he didn’t do it by measuring the Earth and he didn’t just perceive it as self-evident; he inferred it from what he knew about shadows and how long it took camels to move. Stories like that make it easy to believe that reasoning evolved because it supercharged our abilities; it clearly moves us towards truer conclusions, better decisions, and knowledge no other species could infer.

Attempts to describe the rules of good, orderly reason became logic and mathematics, concepts so general and abstract that while we were still animals, armed with them, we were no longer beasts. But that’s the rub, isn’t it? If reasoning is so great, why are we the only species with such a sophisticated grasp of it? And if its purpose is truth and good judgment, why don’t we all agree on everything? These questions make up what Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber call the enigma of reason.

It’s tempting to think that disagreements happen because while I’m being rational, those who disagree with me are being irrational. If only people would use reason and logic. What’s happened to the world! That’s a fair complaint if you’re arguing over logic puzzles, but the world is not a logic puzzle. This, however, is: Paul is looking at Mary. Mary is looking at Peter. Paul is married. Peter is unmarried. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? Yes, no, or not enough information to decide? Think about it. The answer is yes. You may have thought there’s no way to know because we don’t know if Mary is married. But she either is or she isn’t. And if she is, then she, a married person, is looking at Peter, an unmarried person. If she isn’t, then Paul, a married person, is looking at her, an unmarried person. No matter what Mary’s deal is, the answer will be yes.

When people get this puzzle wrong and the correct answer is explained to them, they almost always immediately see why it’s right and change their mind. Life is not usually like that. Now, take a look at this logical syllogism: All elephants are awesome. Michael is an elephant. Therefore, Michael is awesome. This conclusion is logically valid, but it’s not sound. The conclusion follows from these assumptions, but are these assumptions true? No. I am not an elephant. Also, this premise is subjective. What does it mean to be awesome? Can you measure it with an awesome-o-meter?

So you can see why, when analyzing something like our impact on the planet, logic can only be a partial tool. If some people have more to lose than others, who gets to decide which are fair? Still, it would seem that reasoning should help out here. If each of us would just attend to only the facts, surely we’d all recognize the same, reasonable approach. The problem is, that’s not how reasoning works. Since the scientific study of human reasoning began about a hundred years ago, it’s been found again and again that we’re not only bad at reasoning, lazy and biased, but almost seem programmed to be bad. Like the flaws are intentional.

In an episode of Mind Field, I once used a magician to pull off a little experiment. He asked people to look at two faces and choose which of the two they would prefer to work with, placing their preferences in one pile, and those they rejected into another.

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