This is one of my favourite analogies. I “developed” it a few years ago (developed is in scare quotes because it was almost certainly just taken from somewhere else) but it’s been coming up again and again in many areas.
Now, intellectually we know that squares A and B are the same colour (if by colour you mean wavelength of light). We can use an eyedropper in a paint program. We can see a proof with squares A and B joined to reveal a block of single colour. We can watch this video demonstration. We can possibly even create an experiment on an animal that does not experience this illusion to show that it responds to squares A and B in the same manner. Intellectually, we know this with about the maximum certainty that we can know anything.
But of course the illusion persists. Even the Ultimate Professor in neuroscience specialising in colour vision will still see A and B as different colours. The effect persists even when they are delivering a lecture on the illusion. No matter how hard you try, your intellect cannot suppress the illusion. This is as would be expected if the brain was a physical object. There are parts of its structure that you can’t ever change just by thinking about it any more than you can stop the knee jerk reflex by thinking about it.
Now, most of the times when our pre-scientific intuition conflicts with what we know with science it’s the same. We know the theory but cannot control our deeper instincts. This conflict is sometimes used to argue against the non-intuitive view. For instance: “I can’t defeat the arguments against contra-causal free will but I just know that I’m making my decisions (and not just my brain)”. My biased wording of this argument shows what I think of it.
Other times the conflict is lamented, and sometimes it gives rise to some pretty crappy results. But I don’t think that’s useful either since it can’t be fixed short of changing our biology (something I’m in favour of but that’s a separate discussion entirely).
The best we can do is to be aware of the conflict, learn to live with it, learn to treat it as an indictment not of our intellectual knowledge but of our intuition. This is easy with the optical illusion, harder in other areas. But I think taking this attitude with all similar conflicts might make it easier to minimise the conflict (for instance by deferring to science and ignoring our intuitions when necessary).
Some examples of where I think this applies below. Let me know in the comments any others you might have:
- Supersense: we may believe that wearing a serial killer’s jacket won’t infect us with their essence but we’re still reluctant to wear it.
- Biology: we may believe that living things are made of the same matter as non-living things but we’re still folk vitalists, our brains treating living objects as intrinsically, qualitatively different.
- Consciousness: we may believe that minds are fully material but we’re still folk dualists, our brains treating minds as intrinsically, qualitatively different.
- Free will: we may believe that our actions are fully determined but we’re still folk [free will] libertarians, our intuitions fully believing our actions are self-caused.
- Psychology: we may believe that most of our decisions are the result of unconsciousn processes but we still have the feeling our conscious mind oversees 100% of what’s going on.
- Physics: we may believe (say) that without air resistance objects fall at the same speed no matter the mass but our intuition is probably Aristotelian, saying that heavier objects fall faster. I’ve tried to look for a study that has tested this but haven’t found one, still I’m making the prediction that in a study that tests this will bear this out*.
- Astronomy: we may believe that the earth goes around the sun but unless we make the correction each time, we still experience it the Aristotelian way with the sun rising and falling.
- Patternicity/pareidolia: we may not believe that the creaking in the house at night is a poltergeist or ghost but when we hear the creaking our brain still conjures up agents as the first idea about what’s going on.
- Just world theory: we may not believe that bad things happen to bad people but our brains often operate on the assumption that victims “had it coming” regardless.
Most importantly, this happens with cognitive biases — which can in fact be a stand-in for the rest of that list. We may be aware of all the dozens of cognitive biases that our brains feature but this awareness does almost nothing to eliminate the bias. In fact when told about a bias and asked to avoid it, we tend to give the same answers only this time thinking we’ve also been “fair”. This is the best example on the futility of willpower to overcome any of these — instead we need actual systems that try to minimise these (eg. blinding, controls).
*Perhaps one way to test it is by showing a video of someone dropping two differently-weighing objects on two kittens and study the subject’s eye movements, micro-responses etc to see if more people are biased toward the kitten about to be hit with the heavier object.
6 comments ↓
‘[V]ideo of someone dropping two differently-weighing objects on two kittens..’
I can has squeezeburger?
‘[W]e’re still folk vitalists, our brains treating living objects as intrinsically, qualitatively different.’
I think you mean ‘quantitatively’ here, since there’s no quantitative difference between a person alive one moment, and that person’s corpse the next moment, assuming reasonable environmental stability – the same amounts of carbon, oxygen, calcium, iron, and so on exist.
However, there is a qualitative difference between a pile of organic chemicals, and a pile of organic chemicals being pedantic at you from behind a keyboard. The ability for that pile of organic chemicals to be pedantic at all is that very qualitative difference.
Unfortunately, many many people seem to think that a qualitative difference (pedantry) is the same as a quantitative difference (a soul). That the one does not imply the existence of the other is apparently a hard thing for most people to understand.
As for consciousness and free will – I don’t know if there’s a way out of the trap of determinacy as far as thought is concerned, though I wonder if there’s a back door. I wonder if the approach to the question is overly deterministic or mechanistic, particularly in an age when we have no good reason to assume that determinacy is even valid.
As I see it, we’re more than a collection of ingrained or acquired responses to stimuli; certainly, that’s a hell of a lot of what’s involved in our reactions to the world. Even high level thinking is really a cascade of chemistry as deterministic as that last domino falling when the first one is tipped. (I’ve seen some try to weasel out of that by suggesting consciousness is somehow ‘quantum mechanical’, but that doesn’t address how the ability to be conscious in the first place is inherited, as it most obviously is.)
The ‘however’, however, is that our world is not comprised solely of predictable stimuli, and that the reaction chain to a given stimulus is not always predictable either.
That is, the final domino will not fall if something interferes with the cascade. If I remove dominoes 45, 46, and 47 from my careful lineup of 120 tiles, that will break the chain and stop the cascade reaching its conclusion. Domino 1 will fall, but number 120 will remain upright.
Neurosynaptic processes are not as facile as action-reaction. There’s actually a rather complicated series of interactions that seem to be required for pretty much any brain process, and if any one of those interactions becomes attenuated or strengthened in any way at all, the result could follow a different path – a ‘new idea’, perhaps, or a new way of looking at things. A flash of brilliance or a sudden insight – something other than a purely deterministic flow of chemistry from one synapse to the next.
That might be one testable reason why genius and mental illness seem to be closely correlated.
Furthermore, outside stimuli are variable, effectively making deterministic responses nonviable, averaged over time. That is, what worked yesterday as a response to an environmental stimulus is not guaranteed to work tomorrow. What worked yesterday is almost certainly not going to work in 100 years.
So yes, we are governed in the main by deterministic processes, but with enough stochastic variance that there is some wiggle room to permit independent, possibly even original, thought. The physics of the mind may be no more determined, in other words, than the physics of the subatomic.
…and, in an interesting synchronicity, Sam Harris’s most recent post is on the topic of consciousness:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery-of-consciousness/
He doesn’t seem to like see mechanistic or deterministic models applied to consciousness, which is interesting to me.
The kitten experiment won’t decide the issue. Even if our intuition says that the 2 objects fall at the same speed, it will also, truly, say that the heavier weight will hurt more.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think we have any intuition about the speed of falling objects (excluding obvious cases such as feathers).
[...] a way this is another example of the optical illusion analogy. We obviously know the dot is not alive. We would probably write “alive” in [...]
Warren: if what you say about determinism is true then we’d simply be dependent on whatever chance/stochastics interfere with our dominos. The way I see it free will (in its purest nondeterministic definition) is simply an incoherent concept.
Also I do know about Sam Harris, I guess that’s one of the many areas I think he’s wrong.
David: I think kids tend to think heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects — wouldn’t that be this exact intuition?
‘[W]e’re still folk vitalists, our brains treating living objects as intrinsically, qualitatively different.’ — I did mean qualitively as in the idea that living objects have a different (perhaps even “ineffable”) essense — whatever that might mean.
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