by James Wallace Harris, Saturday, November 23, 2019
I’ve been studying Plato. Plato is good for the soul but hard on the ego. Humans often lack the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Our superpower is self-deception. As children, we are told stories that we desperately cling to for the rest of our lives. We adapt to reality by making up explanations that usually end up being fictional. And when our stories clash with reality, the odds are we embrace the story. We aren’t rational. We are rationalizing creatures. We seek what we want by lying to ourselves and the people around us.
Anyone who follows the news knows this.
If a noise wakes us up in the middle of the night we don’t rush outside to investigate it. We start making up explanations trying to imagine what the noise could be. We tell ourselves its a burglar. Or if we’ve seen a raccoon lately, we’ll say to ourselves that Rocky is in the garbage can. Or its the wind, or a fallen tree limb. We can’t help ourselves. Instead of saying we don’t know we imagine that we do. Generally, we imagine wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb called this tendency the narrative fallacy in his book The Black Swan. Neuroscientists call it confabulation. As children, we ask how the world was created and our parents tell us answers to the best of their abilities. How we are raised determines a lot of what we believe. If you were brought up a Southern Baptist more than likely their ideas about God are what you’ll believe for the rest of your life. However, if you were kidnapped at birth and given to a Muslim family in Saudi Arabia you’d grow up believing their local variation of the origin story.
Psychologists and philosophers talk about deception and self-deception. We like to think this problem belongs to other people. Our intuition tells us we’re right. We feel right. But are we?
We want to believe what we learn growing up is the truth. Few people are intellectual rebels that reject their upbringing. Not only will you maintain your beliefs, but you will also rationalize and lie to defend those beliefs.
A good percentage of humans learn to lie to get what they want. Conscious lying sometimes involves knowing the truth but working to suppress it. Liars are different from bullshitters. To a degree, liars are conscious of their lying. Bullshitters, as defined by Harry G. Frankfurt in his philosophical essay “On Bullshit” often don’t know they are lying, or even know what is true. Their grasp of reality is usually tenuous. They have told so many lies they don’t know what’s true anymore, but they have learned they can say anything to get what they want. Their concept of reality is so fluid that it changes from moment to moment.
The trouble is we bullshit ourselves all the time. We are especially dangerous to ourselves and others when we think we know more than we do. This is called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. People who suffer from this cognitive ailment are clueless about their own lack of knowledge. They firmly believe they are smart and wise.
We have so many built-in brain functions for fooling ourselves that I have to wonder if it’s even possible to know the truth if it came up and tapped us on the shoulder.
Most people dismiss philosophy as abstract useless wordplay. I just finished reading Plato in the Googleplex by Rebecca Goldstein and I’ve developed a new respect for Plato and philosophy. Goldstein came up with a very clever gimmick for presenting Plato’s philosophy. She imagines him alive today going on a book tour in America. She has his ancient words respond to our modern conundrums by fictionalizing Plato in different settings arguing with people of varying beliefs. I really recommend listening to this book on audio because these discussions are quite dramatic and effective. When Plato goes on a conservative talk radio show it’s hilarious. But I think my favorite encounter was between Plato and a neuroscientist who was going to scan his brain. The section where he’s on a panel with two opposing authors dealing with education was also quite brilliant.
However, the gist of Plato at the Googleplex is to question what we know and think we know. I’ve been lucky to be the kind of person that’s usually gone against the current, but I realized in later years my skepticism has not always protected me from bullshit. I’m acquiring new levels of doubt as I age realizing my own persistent gullibility.
For example, as a life-long science fiction fan, I’ve had high hopes for the future. I realize now that many of my cherished science-fictional beliefs are no better than what the faithful believe about God, Heaven, angels, and life-after-death.
And there is one cherished concept I have to reevaluate. I’ve always believed that humans would one day overcome their problems with confabulation. 2,400 years ago Plato concluded that only a small percentage of humans would ever be able to tell shit from Shinola. He felt only a few could ever understand what philosophy teaches. I’ve always wanted to assume that we’re evolving, our knowledge is growing, and our abilities to educate are improving, so eventually, that percentage would be much greater.
That belief might be self-deception. But it might not.
We have to honestly ask ourselves can philosophy be integrated into the PreK-12 educational system so the majority of the population understands their problem with confabulation? This is to assume we can be totally different from who we are now as a species. Are we hardwired so we can’t change, or are we adaptable to change if we can find the right educational path?
This experiment would require raising a generation without fiction. That includes both God and Harry Potter. No Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus. We’d have to stop lying to our children, or letting them play with lies and fiction. They’d have to grow up on nonfiction and documentaries instead of fiction, television, and movies.
Children’s entertainment would be limited to sports, games without a fictional narrative component, arts, crafts, and other hobbies. When kids ask why we can only give them answers that we know. For example, if they ask why everything is here we can only answer we don’t know. If they ask who made the world, we can only answer what we know from observable cosmology and geology.
It’s too late for me. I can’t give up fiction. I love it too much. I too addicted. I should be building my own robots and programming them instead of reading science fiction about robots. I wish I was, but it’s so much easier just to dwell in fictional worlds where intelligent robots exist, or we’re colonizing the solar system, or we’re creating utopias.
Fiction offers an infinity of virtual realities we prefer over actual reality. I believe our chronic confabulation is caused by wanting reality to be different from what it is. Buddhists call that desire. Eastern religions teach we should accept reality, whereas western philosophes promote shaping reality to our needs and wants. Western thought is active, it’s all about conquering reality. When we fail we lie to ourselves. Probably we suffer from such great confabulation because we seldom get what we want. It’s easier to have romantic fantasies or watch porn than date than to actually seek out our perfect match.
I think the path lies between the East and West. We shouldn’t be completely passive in our acceptance, but we shouldn’t want absolute control either. It would be interesting to know how people think a thousand years from now. Will they have a more honest relationship with reality? There could be a good science fiction story in that, but then it would be fiction. Maybe there’s another kind of acceptance too. Maybe we have to accept that we are amazing confabulating creatures. It will be a shame when such an imaginative species goes extinct.
And I’m not excusing myself from self-delusion either. My liberal friends and I believe Republicans are only out to reduce taxes and regulations at any cost. That they are either deluded about Trump, consciously lying to get what they want, or they are confabulated by his bullshit. Anyway, they ware willing to back Trump at any cost because Trump gets them what they want.
Like I said, I’m willing to consider this a liberal narrative fallacy. I believe its possible Republicans could be seeing a truth we liberals don’t. However, their stance on climate change suggests they are blind to science. I believe scientific consensus is as close as we ever get to the truth, and I could be wrong about that too. I also know that even though I accept what science says about climate change I don’t act on their conclusions. Oh, I do a token amount, what’s convenient for my consciousness. But if climate change is real, then none of us are doing what it takes to avoid it.
Looking in the mirror and seeing who we really are is hard. That’s what Plato was all about.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
As a psychotherapist, I make a distrinction between what Stephen Bacon in his book, Practicing Psychotherapy In Constructed Reality, calls “fundamental reality” and “constructed reality.” Fundamental reality is empirically based while constructed reality is interpretive or making of meaning of the fundamental reality. People often get confused between the two. Plato talked about “objective truthy” which is equivalent to Bacon’s concept of fundamental reality. Plato also insisted that morals, ethical choices, also can be based on objective truth and fundamental reality. The sophists disagreed and said that “truth” is whatever people can be persuaded it is.
I think literature has an important place in our understanding our moral universe. Jesus taught in parables which point to spiritual truths.
Keep the faith, Jim. You are onto something important here.
I have a suspicion that humans are hard-wired to imagine; to conceive what is not there and envisage the intangible – to fill a void in our knowledge with the products of what we concoct, and then to imagine that this concoction becomes real. I certainly see the way science fiction projected itself in the twentieth century to be an example – as you say, most of what was envisaged is, with hindsight, simply an act of faith. Our imaginations outstripped what the real laws of physics could deliver. Always to be lamented, of course.
Following your train of thoughts, I think (read and experience) more & more that this reality probing exhibited by various non humans & the basic Gedankenexperiment – goes a long way, maybe even towards helping us formulate a general theory of the speculative. Steven Shaviro in his Discognition book tries to separate both philosophy(foundational, grounded) and science (predictable, repeatable) from SF, even if they all partake in this ability or tendency to over reach into the world.
Another great story!!Not depressing : )
The people that have qualified as Giants in our cognitive world also have an enormous imagination. Which makes it impossible to stop storytelling
Thanks for that; a very insightful read.
Bob Clark
I’ve always thought that truth was in the mind of the beholder or so the phrase goes. I’ve been a student of philosophy most of my life. I’ve always found the thoughts of others as both insightful and helpful in trying to make sense of the world we perceive and how our imagination interprets same. I believe (there’s that word) that we are hard wired with the capacity to learn. Soren Kierkegaard makes a distinction between subjective and objective truth that is compelling. He also offers a remedy if we want to escape the confusion wrought by our imagination. In the end our ability to believe whatever it takes to survive will prevail.
Excellent piece! I wrote about the Dunning-Kruger effect in a recent article I wrote on my website titled ‘Do you Know Who You Are? – ://authorjoannereed.net/do-you-know-who-you-are/ – Feel free to check it out! I also quote Socrates in this article. Too many people nowadays don’t spend enough time getting acquainted with the wisdom of the Ancient Greek philosophers. I made a point in my book “This Is your Quest’ to quote from my favorite philosophers and bring to my readers’ attention Western and Eastern Wisdom and philosophy.