Reddit reviews Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind

This one might be good

Thanks for this response. First thing that popped into my head was "it's actually more remarkable that we're ever not sad, considering the futility of existence & inevitability of death". Light and heavy reading on the topic.

> I'm totally on board with the idea that our perceptions are all fabrications, and our seemingly 'real-time' decisions mostly post-facto rationalisations (in some contexts).

So "pink" appears one way to us (within our visual perception) and a TOTALLY different way to a camera/measuring-instrument.

It turns out that when you are faced with an engineering problem (like...my digital camera sees the world as it really IS (without pink), but I need to make a photo that adds pink the in places that humans would perceive "pink- the- experience", I need to engineer the camera to replicate the illusion of the human perceptual system in the same way that will excite the human visual system (2 simultaneous stimuli of ultra-violet + infra-red at the same time). The human perceptual system has a formula for how it invents our perception, and there is a real set of things which can reliably trigger this phenomenon.

OK, so "decisions" appear one way to us (from within our own perceptions of our internality), and a TOTALLY different way to a brain scanner.

I have a feeling this matters as a detail of engineering, if you are trying to make a conscious machine. It's probably analogous to the visual system problem. You might find that you have to engineer synthetic "consciousness" by retracing the same roadmap as how it works in humans, which we don't exactly understand right now.

At this point in time, you can say for sure that it's just interesting how our "perception" of what is going on in consciousness is a poor intuition for what's happening in reality.

Or maybe not. Here's some speculative woo-woo shit. What if the brain is somehow a quantum antenna that picks up the "thought" when it leaks backwards in time from the near-future? Perhaps brain scanners and computers and other instrumentation is FAR away right now from looking at the right set of electromagnetic forces. Our "scanners" are too crude to even be in the right place looking the right way at the issue. What looks like causality in one direction is actually our sensors just totally misunderstanding thought- time- travel and that the causality is working the other direction, backwards through time. Or not. We don't really know right now.

But basically every single thing we look at in science ends up going down this certain trajectory, over history. At one point, there's witchcraft or magic. Evil witches are burned at the stake and the proper prayers to the right benevolent deity have to be cast. Eventually, there's a theory of epilepsy, then eventually a precise understanding of some underlying causes and finally a medical therapy, drug, etc. At some point, epilepsy is some specific thing that always works a certain way with a set of underlying realities that are not arbitrary. It's becomes a known quantity.

I'm just at the point where I'm asking the question about whether we're prepared, as a society, for this same thing to happen to "free will", "responsibilty", "justice", "fairness" etc. What if all those things fall away once we really grasp what it going on in the conscious mind? It turns out that if you want to get rid of "violence", you have to make a better society that will make that inevitable. You can't just blame the violent person, who is really just a kind of victim of something their brain is involuntarily doing to them.

All these things that are a big mystery and chance and randomness at one point in time might actually be deterministic clockwork in a machine, from which there really IS no freedom ( no matter what it might feel like) at a later stage of understanding.

> But lots of people seem to make a leap from fabricated, to 'not real', or 'a lie'.

Sure, that's very tempting. But I don't think the bit totally flips that way, myself. Just because it's not 100% as it seems, doesn't mean it goes to 100% fake.

Can something be "fabricated" and a "lie" without it being an arbitrary lie? Like, what if this "consciousness" thing is just like an optical illusion...where it is a trick that depends on a set of specific inputs. Perhaps, when you have a consistent set of parameters (across different people, different times and with similar effect) the "trick" always works the same. In a sense, we're mapping the hardware/software of the brain to find the right set of details that "provoke" this illusion to come to be.

Down at the bottom, there's a formula, or a set of stimuli, which are nothing like "fake" and these are not optional either. They have to be there, existing, or it doesn't happen.

> The way I see it, my house is fabricated - that doesn't make it any less real.

Exactly. I might think I have pancreatic cancer where the next human might believe it's a spell of the evil witch-doctor and the third person might think it's a hex and the last person thinks it's not enough organic veggies in the diet. But deep underneath, there's a physical reality which is inexorably going to unfold a certain way that's deeply connected to some undeniable true set of circumstances. Reality is a bitch.

> My question to you, and I'm sure it's a standard one: if our perception is flagrantly unreliable, then how can the experiments and arguments showing that it's unreliable, have any validity?

What if our perceptions ARE partially reliable while our intuition of them is not? Say, like, it's true that I think this particular way is north, but it's not true that I know WHY/HOW I think that? Where out in reality, apart from all that, there can still be a referent "north" without us knowing whether I'm right about the direction or whether I'm right about how I came to have the sense of north. Basically, in this kind of case, "north" is happening on several levels at the same time, and this means that "north" has a sort of cybernetic quality that's not very simple but it can seem like it is, because we use the same word "north" quite imprecisely for the idea-north, the feeling-north, the concept-north and the direction-north, etc.

If you have come this far with me, here's the next big idea (from Ajit Varki). Here's a fun review of his book: ""This book answers the never-ending quest of what sets our species apart with a delightful suggestion. It is not so much our awareness of mortality that is special, the authors claim, but rather our ability to push this awareness to the farthest recesses of our minds. The ostrich has nothing on us."

Bottom line, our ancestors would not have made us exist if their brains didn't stop them from clearly thinking about objective reality. What makes us human is that we have a part of the brain which makes us do things that make us make more people, even if that's futile. We're smart, but in the ways that would have interfered with survival, our brain conceals our truth from ourselves, all by design.

As someone who has deeply studied the esoteric systems and the problems of "enlightenment", I think the evolutionary biology idea presented in this recently published book, talked about a bit in the article I linked, may lead to a revolution in "enlightenment"-seeking and advanced consciousness training.

I am likely to be coming back to this idea from biology and genetics again and again.

I'm going to post a few snippets - I think the article is well worth your time, not terribly long, and may take it's place among the most important things you will ever read.

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" ... a tall, intense man with a scraggly beard sat down next to me, introduced himself as Danny Brower, and pointedly informed me that we were “all asking the wrong question.” At first I thought he was some local eccentric, but when I realized he was a well-known professor at the university, I gave him a careful hearing.

Instead of just asking what evolutionary processes made us human, Danny said we should also be asking why such complex mental abilities have appeared only in humans, despite many other intelligent species having existed and evolved for millions of years. In other words, if having complex humanlike mental abilities has been so good for the success of our species (as everyone has assumed), then how is it that we are the only species that got so brainy? The usual assumption is that something very unusual and special happened to human brains during evolution, and that we just need to find out what that something is. But Danny took a fascinating contrarian’s position, saying that we should not be looking for what everyone else was—the presumed special brain changes that made us human. Rather, we should be asking what has been holding back all the other intelligent species that, like humans, seem to have self-awareness of themselves as individuals—a list that may include chimpanzees, orangutans, dolphins, orcas (so-called killer whales), elephants, and even birds such as magpies. Danny asked: Why are there no humanlike elephant or humanlike dolphin species as yet, despite millions of years of evolutionary opportunity for making this transition?

The next mental step beyond the basic awareness of one’s own personhood that many of the species mentioned above seem to possess could be awareness of the personhood of others—in other words, knowing that others of your own kind are also equally self-aware. But Danny argued that gaining this useful ability would also result in understanding the deaths of others of your own kind—and, consequently , realizing one’s own individual mortality. And he suggested that this all-encompassing, persistent, terror-filled realization would cause an individual who first made that critical step to lose out in the struggle to secure a mate and pass his or her genes to the next generation—in other words, such an individual would reach an evolutionary dead end. Danny suggested that we humans were the only species to finally get past this long-standing barrier. And he posited that we did this by simultaneously evolving mechanisms to deny our mortality.

I suspect most readers will have the same initial reaction I had—that this seems much more convoluted and complicated than simply saying that we humans evolved special mental abilities over time. But I realized that Danny was describing an apparently novel theory based on a counterintuitive line of logic, which seemed relevant to explaining both human origins and some unique features of the human mind. And my decade-long self-education about human origins had already prepared me to consider the larger implications of what he was saying. I began to think that such a rare and difficult transition might even possibly explain why all humans on the planet today seem to have emerged from a small group in Africa, completely replacing all other humanlike species that coexisted at the time."

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"Soon after the letter’s publication, I heard from Sheldon Solomon, a member of a well-regarded group of psychologists influenced by the ideas of Ernest Becker and best known for their “terror management theory.” Their concept is supported by various types of experimental evidence and indicates that we humans have a variety of “worldview and self-esteem mechanisms” to deal with the terror of knowing we are going to die. In his letter to me, Solomon wrote: “We agree with your argument that the benefits of consciousness and self-awareness could only be reaped if they were accompanied by simultaneous mechanisms to deny death.”"

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Here's a link to the book, just published, I am going to get it and read it, and see how well he supports his argument:

Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind

Except that denial of negative realities has recently been touted as the very mechanism responsible for our overwhelming dominance and progression, not "holding bad news with more regard than good".

>In Denial, biologists Varki and Brower (Brower died in 2007) propose a novel explanation for why humans surpassed all other species in mental prowess. The authors argue that as humans contemplated the intentions of those around them, they began reflecting more deeply on the meaning of life itself, and this examination led to the frightening awareness of their mortality. To assuage such fears, humans evolved the unique ability to deny reality. The authors reason that religion and philosophy represent some of our best efforts to do so.

>Scientific American goes on to opine that, “Although a gift for self-deception may have saved our ancestors from despair, it might also be our downfall. But recognizing this tendency in ourselves may push us to stop ignoring unpleasant truths, such as global warming and poverty, and start addressing them.”