The Stories We Tell Ourselves

The other night I had dinner with a gaming buddy and on the way home we got to discussing the nature of consciousness.  My friend had just read Peter Watts' Blindsight and I had been watching Big Brother.  The mix made for an interesting discussion as we considered the possibility that rather than being a question of quantitative differences in processing power, intelligence might actually be a question of how many programmes you have and how fast you can run them.  If true, this would mean that stupid people aren't just like smart people only less so... they actually think in a qualitatively different way.  Watts makes the point about sociopaths and vampires being different forms of thinker who learn to look like other people.  What happens if we extend this idea to normal people?  Is Charley Uchea a different kind of cognitive entity to me?  we could be but by virtue of sharing a cognitive community, we've both learned how to adapt our software so as to make sense of other people AND not look overly weird.

I then wondered what this might mean for people attempting to write characters as well as what it means for the critic attempting to make sense of those characters?

Are we narcissistically stuck, falsely assuming that everyone else thinks the way we do?

My friend then got back to me today and drew my attention to something said by Watts when I interviewed him :

"I'd like to clarify my own take on "non-conscious but intelligent animals".  In the context of the book, this is reasonably clear-cut-- not so in real life, where thanks to Descartes and his ilk we seem to be in a state of denial about "animal consciousness".  I suspect that we have enormously underestimated the cognitive complexity of other creatures.  I don't think anyone who's shared living space with a cat would deny there's *some* kind of pernicious, forward-thinking agenda in those furry little brains.  And yes, there's a certain level of anthropomorphism in that observation, but I'd argue that anthropomorphism is the only justifiable approach to take in such cases. The neural architecture most fundamentally associated with the conscious state exists in everything from boney fish on up (invertebrates and elasmobranchs, not so much).  Much of our emotional response circuitry is pretty consistent across a wide range of mammalian species, and there is a wealth of behavioral data on everything from deception to bereavement in other species which, if observed in humans, would unquestioningly be attributed to conscious motives.  If we were talking about anything other than consciousness, scientists would unhesitatingly generalise-- parsimony suggests that similar systems displaying similar emergent behaviors probably share similar subjective states, even though we have no first-hand means of confirming that.  The only alternative is to assume that there are special rules that apply only to human beings and to nothing else on the planet, and that way lies religious retardation.

Why, then, do so many of us-- and not just the usual biowhores who front for zoos and oceanariums-- deride anthropomorphism as somehow "unscientific"?  Sure, other animals have less intricate brains than we do; but a lot of computer programs that run on a modern-day Itanium chip can also run on an old 386."

Obviously, here Watts is drawing attention to our willingness to distance ourselves from other animals despite their behaving in ways very similar to us.  However, the flip side of this idea is that a consciousness that is in fact quite different, can appear to be similar.  There's a difference between the way a human thinks and the way a cat thinks but the cat is still probably conscious... it's just running slightly different software to us.  What Watts and my friend are talking about are the failures in what philosophers of mind call Folk Psychology.

Folk Psychology is the model we have running in our head that allows us to interpret what emotional state other people are in as well as what they mean when they try to talk to us.  At the crudest level it involves assuming that when someone says "The Cat Sat On The Mat" they mean that the cat sat on the mat and that all the words they are using mean what they think they do.  In more advanced example we know that if a person crosses their arms and says "that's fine" then they probably don't mean that it's fine.  Philosophers are still arguing whether Folk Psychology is a set of beliefs we hold or whether we emulate what another person is going through and see how we'd react to it.

What my friend and I were wondering is whether Folk Psychology is actually as useless as every other set of common sense beliefs have been proved to be over the years.  After all, we have no intuitive grasp of how the universe works, why should we have a good intuitive grasp of how other people think?  What we may in fact have are a useful set of templates that both fuel our assumptions about others and get used by us to communicate our emotional states.  In fact, what Folk Psychology might well be is an approachable middle ground or social lingua franca that allows us broadly to function but can let us down when dealing with individuals as unless we really know someone, it's impossible to know what is really going on inside their heads.

If this is true it means that characterisation as well as interpretation of how characters are acting pulls towards a bland middle ground.  We assume that other people function the way we think we do and then we produce bland two-dimensional characters grounded in folk psychology and, as critics, we frequently miss the nuances of the more complex characters written by people who are able to free themselves from the limitations of folk psychology.  The best example I can think of of this is the TV Show Six Feet Under.  Six Feet Under is great because it has a really obvious folk psychology informing how the characters are written and this folk psychology is transparently informed by psychoanalysis (itself a relatively successful attempt at redrafting folk psychology).  Every series of Six Feet Under features the same cyclical pattern of people being happy, becoming unhappy, projecting and then things getting worse until the character either goes into therapy or has a moment of clarity.

I don't know about you, but my life is nothing like that.  So, is this bad writing or is it something more philosophically interesting?

The answer is that I'm not sure but I think it does open up the possibility for greater leeway in the creation and the interpretation of different characters.  Science Fiction is, supposedly at least, all about encountering the Other... what if the Other is not necessarily some alien species but just everyone else we meet?

Comments

[Ren]

You didn't already think that the Other is everyone else we meet? I guess we really *are* different... people are stranger when you are strange ;-) Unfortunately humans have a propensity for slapping labels and/or diagnoses on people "not like us" (e.g. American Psycho, Speed of Dark). It would be interesting to see a story where all characters are "not like the protagonist" (including, perhaps, the reader) and nobody has any conditions. Maybe more interesting if the protagonist's own identity slowly got eroded by the Other within during the course of the story until he or she finally achieved total alienation and had no identity left. Perhaps not uplifting, but interesting.

[Serdar]

There is a great deal to respond to here, although I don't think I can do it in the course of a reply post. Look for a follow-up on my own site.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

RenFayre - I do think that other people are Other but not necessarily in a profound philosophical way.

You're right that this would make for quite a good story. Indeed, one of the thing that frequently annoys me is when alien mindsets are represented more as different beliefs or emotional responses... not completely different ways of thinking. Serial Killer stories are particularly prone to this somewhat weirdly.

Serdar - Fair enough... I shall take a look :-)

[A.R.Yngve]

OK, so Jonathan's thought processes *might* be fundamentally different from mine, and ours in turn might be fundamentally different from Peter Watts'...

... but what matters most, is the consensus we create -- our "shared reality" if you like. Societies function (more or less) because different people agree on certain basic rules and laws (more or less).

Same thing with interaction between individuals. We form a consensus on how to talk, behave, and interpret each other. In my view, this consensus is of much greater importance than what's actually happening inside our brains.

Language is the supreme determining part of this consensus: If we couldn't even agree on what words and sentences meant (including sign language!), interaction would be impossible.

I would even go so far as to state: We're not humanity. Language is humanity. (Do you think language cares which animal it's hitching a ride on? If cows could speak and write, they'd become human.)

And here's the big challenge: We're forcing our consensus upon all other animals on this planet. Year after year, century after century, we're forcing other animals to see our books, our newspapers, listen to our radio, watch our television, follow our routines, hear us talk, live in our cities...

...is it any wonder we suspect they're getting smarter? They probably are.

A small example: as I was sitting on a train the other day, I looked out the window and noticed something: A cluster of tiny winged insects -- gnats, maybe -- clung to the outside surface of the window. As the train picked up speed, one by one the insects were blown off.

Why did they cling to the window, at great risk of being torn apart, instead of just taking off when the train started to move? Were these insects using our trains to commute?
:-S

[Jonathan McCalmont]

There was a theory a while back that London pigeons were using the underground to get around... the truth was somewhat more mundane I think.

You're right that, pragmatically, we have a "standard model" for human psychology that allows us not only the communicate with others but also to guess about other people's inner states and motivations.

However, if we're dealing with characterisation in a book, particularly if something is written in the first person, you don't want it to be all about that standard model... you want it to be realistic.

[David Harmon]

This note got really long, but I'm going to post it anyway... I'd like to insert that I don't agree that a non-conscious intelligence would necessarily be sociopathic, and the reason I think so is precisely the multilayer structure I'm describing.

I'd say that "Folk Psychology" represents a toolset granted us by our evolutionary history. It almost certainly has at least three layers, each operating at a corresponding layer of our mental structures:

(1) Instincts: These produce both actions and emotional responses, which turn out to be surprisingly important for cognition in general. I believe that humans have a disrupted version of the primate corpus of instinct. The effect seems to be that we individually "choose" many options from across the known primate behavior range, plus a few. Even so, some selections are clearly dominant -- humans always form tribe-like groupings, for example. Much of our dominance and courting behavior seems heavily underlaid with instinctive responses.

(2) Prepared learning: A good deal of the "choices" for human "ur-instincts" are implemented by way of "prepared learning", or developmental switches. Thus the effects of childhood abuse and neglect are not just a matter of "learning the wrong lessons", but of developmental responses to a socially hostile environment, and thus difficult to affect at a later developmental stage. Many of the switches can of course be tipped by internal (genetic) factors, which is why temperament is quite heritable.

3) Social Learning: One of the true human innovations, is that a good deal of our mental development has been "outsourced" from the individual entirely, to reside in the aggregate state of the community. Any stable society will have a superstructure of "culture" which helps to maintain the key social patterns and behavior of that culture. This includes proven techniques for making prepared-learning choices come out "the right way" (most of the time), and also social mechanisms for dealing with the unruly.

A basic part of this last is the interpretation of people's behavior, and that includes the more culture-dependent parts of the "locally canonical" Folk Psychology. (Had to come back to that eventually. ;-) ) Note that the "evolutionary target" here isn't whether the FP is "right" or even "useful", but whether the actions it prompts will help maintain a status quo which supports the FP!

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I agree with you about sociopathy not being a logical result of lack of sentience.

Traditionally when genre writers wanted to portray another species or race they'd reach for the anthropology text book or pull out a few national stereotypes.

Now I think that's fallen slightly by the way-side and now writers reach for the psychology textbook and pick out a mental illness. Sociopathology's just an easily recognisable example of something that's mentally "other".

Your points about the nature of learning are well made. After all, finding out how things REALLY work is a profoundly unnatural way of thinking about the world. I read a really interesting article about early modern France that explained how in a pre-literary culture the bulk of people relied entirely on these little aphorisms. Hundreds of them on a par with "Red Sky at night, shepherd's delight".

[David Harmon]

Now I think that's fallen slightly by the way-side and now writers reach for the psychology textbook and pick out a mental illness.

Feh. I wonder how long until we see "autistic" aliens (aside from the gorilla Koko and her ilk). I'd also like to point out that James Blish's A Case Of Conscience did a brief, but fairly good, take on the idea of "aliens without morality", and that was waytheheck back....