In the last year, I have read four ( + one) books that I thought summed up the why-what-how of humanity’s evolution very well. Respectively, The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (Donald D. Hoffman), and Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Anil Seth) (my favourite this year), The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Ian McGilchrist) (first among my favourites last year), The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Joseph Henrich) (don’t worry, it is inclusive enough in this context), and finally the + one The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness (Stanislav Grof) because while it is fringe science and despite the qualitative proof, I wasn’t convinced on the existence of divinity, I think our experiences in our non-ordinary states of consciousness has a connection with the ‘why’.
The theme that unites them is entropy and ‘order’. Haha, school stuff, I know. So here’s a quick refresher. Simplistically, entropy is the measure of the degree of disorder in a system. The second law of thermodynamics states that in any isolated system, the total entropy tends to increase or remain constant over time. Our universe is an isolated system because, as far as we know, there is nothing else other than our universe; there is no external environment that our universe can exchange matter or energy with.
Let’s begin with Hoffman. He points out how natural selection is the only process we know that ‘fights’ entropy. It pushes organisms to higher degrees of functional order to try and delay entropy if not offset it completely. Across a vast amount of time, it has tweaked living systems to not just be fit for survival, but also reduce disorder. But there is a trade-off. We don’t see reality as it is. He posits that “some form of reality may exist, but may be completely different from the reality our brains model and perceive.” Maya, anyone? He compares this to icons on our screens that are a way of interacting with the system but don’t look/feel/behave like the system underneath. They are a user interface that spares you tiresome details on software, transistors, magnetic fields, logic gates etc. And everything we perceive around us through our sensory organs and mind is just like that – icons that help us navigate. Our perceptions don’t even have the right language to understand/describe reality. Think of it like the UI or formats we have evolved for navigating the world, and there are different ‘languages’ for different species.
The non-ordinary experiences – courtesy psychedelics etc – that Grof writes about , I suspect, opens up our brain to a different language and thus a different interpretation of the world. A perception of reality in a different language.
Anil Seth also touches upon how our brain is wired for survival and the functional order that natural selection is driving towards. Reality is an interpretation, and the entire process is not optimised for accuracy, it is designed for utility. ‘We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us.’ A mechanism of making it seem real so we respond to it. Additionally, perception is a ‘controlled hallucination’ (phrase by Chris Frith), an active construction as opposed to a passive registering of an external reality. The brain constantly makes predictions about the causes of its sensory signals through a Bayesian process in which the sensory signals (also) continuously rein in the brain’s various hypotheses. Perception is thus a continual process of prediction error minimisation (reducing the difference between what the brain expects and what the signal provides) because lesser error, more order, lesser entropy.
McGilchrist ‘s work goes deeper into the functioning. The right is present and pays attention to the world outside, the left re-presents. The differences between them are less about what they do and more about how they approach something. A fascinating perspective on how the two halves of our brain have quite different worldviews – the “left hemisphere is detail-oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things, and is inclined to self-interest, where the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility, and generosity.” Relatively, mechanisms offer more control (order) and predictability than living things. Thanks to its ability to break things down into simple answers and better articulation, the left hemisphere has been able to grab control at an accelerated pace since the Industrial Revolution, and create a world where it prizes precisely these capabilities in individuals, institutions, and culture at large.
And finally, Henrich, overlapping with McGilchrist, shows how cultural learning adaptively rewires our brains and biology to calibrate them for navigating our culturally constructed worlds. “Unlike other animals, we have evolved genetically to rely on learning from others to acquire an immense amount of behavioural information, including motivations, heuristics, and beliefs that are central to our survival and reproduction.” From kinship altruism and pair bonding to our own motor patterns to projectile technology and food processing to grammar and social norms. When you look around, the dominant narrative is the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) one. Broadly, individualism and personal motivation (self focus, guilt over shame, dispositional thinking – based on intent not context, low conformity, self regulation and control and patience, time thrift, value of labour, desire for control and choice), impersonal pro-sociality (impartial principles, trust, honesty and cooperation with strangers and impersonal institutions, emphasising mental states in moral judgment, not revengeful but willing to punish third parties for not sticking to principles, reduced in-group favouritism, free will, belief in moral truths like physics principles, linear time), and perceptual and cognitive abilities and biases (analytical over holistic thinking, attention to foreground and not surroundings, endowment effect, overconfidence on own abilities) are all features of this, and the correlation with higher functional order is evident.
If I look around the metro crowd in India and across the world, the optimisation for WEIRD is rising. As I wrote in Kaumpromise, we can still see an alternate way in patches. It’s interesting how with the rise of AI, we are at once creating even more order in many ways but at the same time ceding control to blackboxes. That requires some thought, and another post!
P.S. There is a nice time dimension to this as well, brought out in monochronic and polychronic cultures. Read more here.