Daniel Kahneman is an intellectual grey-eminence of the past
several decades.
If you read at
all, you have met some of his ideas (usually written in conjunction with his
trusty sidekick Tversky) , though generally at second-hand.
Now he has written his own lengthy and
systematic account of his research, aimed at a lay audience.
Most
reviews of Daniel Kahneman’s new book (
Thinking: Fast and Slow)
simply choose a few from his wealth of anecdotes and recount them.
Not a bad plan -- they are all worth hearing. By contrast, Freeman
Dyson, in a typically canny
offering in the current
New York Review of Books,
goes beyond the usual review, offering some trenchant personal
experiences that illustrate the cognitive case being made, and -- quite
surprisingly in the current climate -- puts in a word for Freud: not
the Freud of
Die Traumdeutung or the cigars, but of the seminal
Psychopathologie des Alltaglebens. He concludes: “The insights of Kahneman and Freud are complementary rather than contradictory.”
Noting
that neither Sigmund Freud nor William James comes in for mention in
Kahneman’s long book, Dyson also outlines the present relevance of this
giant of psychology (and one of the
heroes of this blog).
Make
no mistake -- Kahneman, like Steven Pinker, is one of psychology’s
good-guys, plumbing the richness of human experience though coming to
mostly dry and deflating conclusions. Unlike the
eliminative materialists
(which includes many of the tribe of neuroscientists), they do not take
mere mechanism as a posit, rather than as an occasional result. James
and Dyson, unlike most of their scientific colleagues then and now, have
thought deeply about religion and take it quite seriously; our family
had the benefit of Dyson’s teaching at the Presbyterian Church in
Princeton. His invariably broad and thoughtful perspective is ever
welcome.
Footnote: I
subsequently borrowed an audiobook of Thinking: Fast and Slow from
the library, to listen through in stages along my commute. Alas, it turns out not to be
suitable for that medium, save perhaps for a beginner. Far too much of it is
platitudinous -- boring to sit
through, while the reader-aloud drones on. With a printed work, your eyes rapidly scans
past the overly familiar, and plucks the occasional novel niblet.
Part of the problem is adumbrated in this passage from
America’s premier psychologist of the nineteenth century:
Philosophers long ago observed the
remarkable fact that mere familiarity with things is able to produced a feeling
of their rationality.
-- William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality”, in The
Will to Believe (1897).
Kahneman rediscovers that remarkable fact, with much
spilling of ink, waving of hands, and conducting of unsurprising
experiments.
More interesting is what James writes immediately after
that, showing that today’s postmodernist-style relativists have also not brought forth something
new under the sun:
The empiricist school has been so
much struck by this circumstance
as to have laid it down that the feeling of rationality and the feeling
of familiarity are one and the
same thing, and that no other kind of rationality than this exists.
(I have satirized that dreadful mindset
here.)
~
In an
earlier essay,
we examined the politics and natural selection of sex as reflected in
the writings of Steven Pinker. There is a Kahnemanian cognitive
dimension here as well, of which we now give an example.
Pinker
wades patiently through the swamps of Political Correctness; we salute
his perseverence. It really is remarkable, the sort of
emotionally-founded cognitive distortions he must contend with.
Thus,
consider this thought-experiment: Imagine that some researchers
published a study suggesting that the higher crime rate for American
Blacks is a consequence of innate criminality. They would of course be
denounced by Blacks and their champions; but would scarcely be
denounced as blaming White crime victims. So much is obvious.
Yet now put in different substitutions for x and y, and though the logical structure has not changed, the political picture has changed entirely. The Blank Slate, p. 161:
Even heavier bipartisan fire has recently been aimed at Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer for suggesting in their book A Natural History of Rape
that rape is a consequence of men’s sexuality. A spokesperson from the
Feminist Majority Foundation called the book “scary” and “regressive”
because it “almost validates the crime and blames the victim.”
By contrast, men as such did not object. We’re used to it.
The average zealot would be quite incapable of perceiving the logical parallelism between the two accounts.
Similarly
Pinker, op. cit., p. 372, re the "Laws of Behavior Genetics": "It is
because the laws run roughshod over the Blank Slate, and the Blank Slate
is so entrenched, that many intellectuals cannot comprehend an alternative to it, let alone argue about whether it is right or wrong." A depressing, accurate, and important observation.
~
Here and elsewhere, Pinker counters the
Noble-Savage ideology that whatever is found in nature must be good. P. 164
It
is inherent to our value system that the interests of women should not
be subordinated to those of men, and that control over one’s body is a
fundamental right that trumps other people’s desires. So rape is not
tolerated, regardless of any possible connection to the nature of men’s
sexuality.
So
far, the standard viewpoint, sensibly put. But then Pinker, whose
logical scalpel is sharp, cuts down another level to make a quite
interesting philosophical point:
Note
how this calculus requires a “deterministic” and “essentialist” claim
about human nature: that women abhor being raped. Without that claim
we would have no way to choose between trying to deter rape and trying
to socialize women to accept it, which would be perfectly compatible
with the supposedly progressive doctrine that we are malleable raw
material.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
Nook lovers are book
lovers!
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
For college psychology instructors:
Here is an experiment you can do with your class, if you don’t mind being denied tenure.
Divide your students randomly into two groups, and send them to separate rooms. To the first group, present the sentence:
Men are hot; women are cold.
(This is along the lines of such parlor-game titles as “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”.)
To the other group, present this sentence:
Women are hot; men are cold.
Assignment: Discuss.
Prediction: Both groups will denounce their respective sentence as sexist and anti-woman.
[Postscript] Chesterton anticipated this sally:
Re G.B. Shaw:
He has pleased all the bohemians by suggesting that women are equal to men; but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women.
-- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905)
~
Kahneman,
as Dyson points out, avoids discussing religion; this is probably just
as well. Pinker -- whose range of interests is extraordinarily broad --
to his credit does not avoid it; indeed he quotes (pp. 186-7) from
the magnificent 1996 address by Pope John Paul II on the subject of
Natural Selection and the “ontological
discontinuity” (we have treated of this subject here); but analytically, in this arena, he is not at his best. On page 189 he dishes up an absurd false-dichotomy:
Who says the doctrine of the soul is more humane than the understanding of the mind as a physical organ?
Already
so much has gone wrong. We do not adhere to the doctrine of the soul
(or of free will) because it is “humane”, but because it is true, and we
experience it as such. Nor does such a doctrine impede or even
impinge upon the understanding of the brain as a physical organ. As for the mind
as a physical organ, um, did you really mean to write that? Are we
back with Descartes and his lodgement of the soul in the pituitary or
the pineal gland or wherever the hell he placed it?
It
gets worse. The consequences of the “doctrine” of the soul (though, in
our view, this is rather like speaking of the “doctrine” of the
existence of the physical world) is “letting people die of hepatitis
or be ravaged by Parkinson’s disease when a cure may lie in research on
stem cells…” Indeed a cure might be thus expedited, or it might not;
the soul is nothing to the issue. The moral quandary is rather to what
extent society is willing to go, to benefit group A at the expense of
group B. Effective but morally debateable maneuvers include:
harvesting stem cells from embroyos; harvesting embryos; harvesting
aborted fetuses; harvesting fetuses not yet aborted but which, for a
fittybone, the unwed mother would be happy to sell you. Plus harvesting
organs from dead adults; from living but brain-dead adults; from
criminals; from political prisoners; from the luckless, kidnapped for
this very purpose. Perhaps less effective from a flinty Western medical
perspective, but quite real and effective to its practitioners, is
harvesting such organs as genitals from living children (our group B,
here rather at a disadvantage) for use in sorcery to benefit group A
(which in their own estimation, includes all the best people).
All these practices may be found in the world today,
though generally not in places where the influence of the Holy Mother
Church is at its strongest. John draws the line at one place, Mary at
another; and if you were to do a statistical study, it might well be
that churchgoers, on average, place it somewhat more towards the
less-interventionist end than do vivisectionists, grave-robbers or
eliminative materialists. That would be sociologically rather
interesting, if true; Pinker has however made no
logical point. Nor does his heroically rising to the defense of helpless Al
zheimer’s
patients, who apparently are being abused by nuns when these are not
otherwise engaged in cackling over the sufferings of Parkinsonians,
contradict anything a theist would say (apart perhaps from heretics
like Christian Scientists): “Sources of immense misery” (notice the
purely emotion-evoking addition of the adjective) “such as Alzheimer’s
disease … will be alleviated not by treating thought and emotion of
manifestations of an immaterial soul but by treating them as
manifestations of physiology and genetics.” Amen; hear, hear; we can
all of us drink to that. Pinker’s lance has pierced a straw-man.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
Pinker
touches bottom with this assertion: “The doctrine of a soul that
outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily
devalues the lives we live on earth.” (Compare: "The doctrine that we
should become adults is offensive, as it devalues childhood.")
Leave
aside that outsider’s-assessment-word “righteous”, analogous to the
skewed perspective of the word “humane” above (We believe, or
disbelieve, or simply hope, as the case may be, in eternal life, from
conviction or revelation or even logic or what have you, but not because
such a belief -- true or false -- seems “righteous”). Notice, though,
that qualifier “necessarily”, which changes the assertion from a
sociological generalization or barroom opinion into one of
logico-philosophical apodixis. Yet the only evidence he offers for this
extraordinary doctrine is the self-serving rationalizations (or
irrationalizations) of maniacs who kill their kids, and the rants of
al-Qaeda suicide-bombers. (Page 189 -- look it up if you can’t believe
your eyes.)
Good - Heavens! For all
we know, some serial killer has excused his crime-spree by an allusion
to the Riemann Hypothesis; the effect of such grotesques upon number
theory will rightly be nil.
Beyond
the logical point, Pinker’s assertion is psychologically absurd. It
may well be the case (though God forbid), that those who hope they may
one day rest in the bosom of Abraham are destined to be cruelly
disabused; but their doctrine does tend rather to distinguish this view
of life from that of scorpions in a bottle.
For a glimpse at the value placed upon human life among a proud, free people unpolluted by Christian superstitions, click
here, and
here.
[update 8 May 2012] And now here:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/05/south-koreans-confiscated-pills-human-remains.html
South
Korean customs said it had confiscated more than 17,000 “health”
capsules smuggled from China that contain human flesh, most likely
extracted from aborted fetuses or stillborn babies.
(Note, though: these are quibbles; just a turf thang, folks. Pinker's book overall is broad, sound, and beautifully written.)
(For more along these lines: )
