An Autodidact's Bible, #10
Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 2, Chapter 2a
This is the tenth installment of the serial of my forthcoming book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. As with other installments, part of it is behind the paywall. Become one of my supporters to get the whole thing.
Catch up on earlier installments here:
#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9
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Chapter 2
Outfitting Yourself: The Universals
The philosopher Daniel Dennett has spotted a pitfall of language that’s very easy to fall afoul of when discussing things like emotions, knowledge, and truth.
There are some statements, he says, that have two possible interpretations: one trivial, and one apparently profound. In some such statements, only the trivial interpretation is true—the apparently profound interpretation, upon examination, turns out to be meaningless. In some cases, if the apparently profound interpretation were true, it would have earth-shaking implications, and in such cases the obviousness of the trivial truth tempts the mind to accept the profound (but erroneous) meaning.
Some examples:
Love is just a word.
God is love.
Whatever will be, will be.
Beauty is only skin deep.
The first of these is something called a “use-mention error,” meaning that one is treating the mention of a word as if they are using it. The word “love” in “I love you” does not mean the same thing as it does when I say “‘Love’ is a behavior characterized by devotion and loyalty, frequently accompanied by feelings of warmth, familial identification, or sexual attraction.” In the first sentence, I am using “love.” In the second, I’m merely mentioning it. A use-mention error confounds the two.
The second is a false equivalence. If God is love, then love is God. For the statement to be true in its profound sense, it would have to be true in both directions, and would have some seriously profound implications for the state and nature of the universe. For example, if there is a God, and that God is actually love, and the universe is as cruel and uncaring as it appears to be, then not only would theodicy wonks have a field day, but all high priests of the one true religion (whichever that one was) would be major BDSM aficionados.1 Whatever God might be (opinions vary), whether a God exists or not (another matter upon which disputes tend to multiply), it is very unlikely that love is actually God—even Aphrodite was the goddess of love, rather than love itself.
The third of these is, strictly speaking, a tautology (or, as my younger brother calls it, a “Well duh!”). A tautology is a phrase which is so plainly obvious as to be redundant or logically circular. A few very special cases aside (in which tautologies are used to express algorithms2 or to illuminate truths hiding in plain sight3), tautologies are pretty much meaningless by definition. In other words, all tautologies are tautological.
And as for beauty being only skin-deep? This one feels profound because it’s meant to remind you that looks aren’t everything, but the way it’s constructed is quite plainly a lie. All species on Earth respond to beauty. Babies respond to beauty before they can even hold their heads up without help. The concept of beauty is so deep in our genetic wiring that we devote a substantial portion of our energy and wealth as a species to creating and admiring beautiful things. We’ve even analogized the concept into a spiritual term—goodness, integrity, mercy, and infectious joy are all markers of “inner beauty.” If beauty were truly only skin-deep, that would make the whole of human culture look even sillier than it already does.4
Dennett calls statements like this “deepities,”5 because they sound like they should be, like, deep, man, you know? The deepity, in its various guises, is the monkey wrench lurking in the cognitive machinery. It’s a tricky little bastard, well-suited to hijacking the mind by playing on our innate intellectual weaknesses like a stage magician plays on your visual weaknesses.
A well-constructed deepity (or an artful arrangement of them) can be so effective that it can act like curtains in your glass box, successfully masking off entire portions of the world from your view. They do this by playing on two of your most basic survival tools: curiosity, and counter-intuition.
Counter-intuition is your ability to notice anomalies. Things that do not fit in some fundamental fashion. It comes in handy for everything from spotting a predator lurking in the grass to detecting deception in a shifty salesman to uncovering errors in your own worldview: if something persistently doesn’t fit your mental model of what is going on, even if you don’t notice it consciously, you begin to feel uneasy.
Uneasiness, in turn, arouses your curiosity. Indulging that curiosity is a pleasurable experience. So, you develop mental habits that draw you to puzzles that are constructed so as to capture and hold your attention.
Aphorisms, such as are characteristic of the world’s great wisdom literature, play on this machinery. So do riddles and puzzles and mystery novels. So do Zen kōans.
Kōans are worth consideration here, as they are deliberately constructed as mental cul-de-sacs that force you to change your perspective in order to get a view of your own cognition.
Consider the classic:
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound?”
This is self-evidently stupid if you have even the slightest understanding of physics, but that’s not the point of the question (especially as it was formulated before the physics of sound was well understood). The point is about perception, and the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity—and, importantly, it’s a riddle with no answer (unless you resort to invoking physics). It’s a Socratic question, meant to start a conversation that will reveal things about how your mind works that you might not otherwise verbalize or consider.
Or consider the less propositional kōan: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Again, the self-evidently nonsensical construction invites deeper contemplation on the nature of agents in the world, and how things emerge from interactions rather than existing as things-in-themselves. It also offers an opportunity for undirected reflection because of its nonsensical nature (undirected reflection being one of the objects of certain types of meditation).
The deepity works like the kōan in that it is nonsensical and it easily captures the imagination, but that’s where the similarities end. Think of it as the shifty, out-of-work, alcoholic brother of the kōan. Where the kōan’s purpose is to stimulate reflection, dialog, and illuminate limits of the self (its original purpose was to test the egocentrism and spiritual progress of Zen acolytes), the deepity deals from the same rhetorical deck, but uses its cards to subvert reflection, curtail thought, and short-circuit discussion.
Deepities are your enemy. They’re everywhere, and they will stick to you from time to time whether you like it or not. But, just as you can build a boat that attracts fewer barnacles, so you too can build an approach to knowledge that makes it harder to inadvertently collect deepities.
Like the Zen student, if we wish to avoid deepities and embrace wisdom, we must start with the assumption that the world is not necessarily as we perceive it, but that there nevertheless is something there, apart from our own consciousness, that can be perceived.6
In other words, we need universally applicable tools for engaging the world that exists on the other side of those glass walls.
Structural Engineering
If you look around at the world, you will very quickly notice that patterns recur. Most higher animals have four limbs, for example. Tree leaves and river deltas and blood circulation networks and neuro-connectome7 graphs and semi-intelligent yellow slime molds8 all display a similar fractalized branching pattern that can almost be substituted one for the other with no one the wiser (perhaps with the slightest bit of color correction if you want to really sell the deception).