I have always been fascinated by the question of belief. Especially belief in things that are impossible to prove or disprove. I have wondered what the purpose of such beliefs would be.

Recent speculation has suggested that a genetic predisposition to gullibility might enhance survival. This seems to defy common sense.  You would think that the closer a person could come to an accurate picture of reality, the better suited they would be for survival.

The argument goes something like this. If you saw a shadow in the forest and thought that it might be a tiger, you would run away. If you were wrong, no harm done. On the other hand, if you saw a shadow in the forest and dismissed it as a bush and you were wrong, you might wind up dead. Therefore, it would be best to err on the side of belief in a danger. So, those who a little more gullible would survive to pass on their genes while those who were more skeptical would not.

So much for the idividual but what about the group? There has been a big debate in evolutionary theory over whether survival selection operates primarily at the individual level or the group level. Some research with software agents has yielded provacative results. One  group of agents was programmed to believe only things that could be validated. Another group was programmed to believe in both things that could be valideated and things that could not  be validated. It turns out that the group that shared a belief in things that could not be validate fared  better in internal cooperate and external competition than the group that went strickly by what could be validated.

Apparently, belief in things that cannot be validated could enhance survival at both the individual and group level.

Surveys of belief indicate that those with strong religious beliefs live longer, are healthier and happier. Research has shown that being able to understand the reason something happened can help a person cope with stress. So, if a person believes strongly that some supernatural power controls the world and that everything that happens happens for a reason, that person would cope better with stressful events even if they could not aticulate the reason for a particular event.

Loneliness can be very stressful and injurious to health. Believing that an invisible supernatural person loved you and was always with you could help someone cope with loneliness.

Consideration of individual mortality has been shown to be stressful. Believing that a supernatural power can grant eternal life if one believes strongly enough would be helpful in coping with fear of death.

Recently, a gene was discovered that appears to enhance the placebo effect. Apparently, if a person has this gene, they are susceptible to placebos. If you don’t have the gene, you are not. Is this the belief gene?

There seem to be a lot of reasons for a belief in things that cannot be proven or dis-proven to survive. Unfortunately, there are times when such a belief could prove to be fatal. So if seems that skepticism will also survive.

There have a been a lot of stories lately from Ted Haggard to Eliot Spitzer that beg the question of why some very smart and capable people do some very stupid things. I have been thinking about this and I decided that some of my recent research on psychology can shed light on this question.

1) Paradoxical effect: There is a paradoxical effect when someone tries not to think about something. If you tell someone not to think about a white elephant, part of their mind starts monitoring the subject of their thoughts to see if white elephant thoughts occur. If they do this on a regular basis, they can keep thoughts of white elephants to a minimum but every now and then, a white elephant thought will spontaneously pop up.

2) Extrinsic and Intrinsic motivation: You may be extrinsically motivated by something such as ideology and public scrutiny to banish unwanted thoughts or you may be intrinsically motivated by your own deep feelings to banish unwanted thoughts.

3) Extrinsic motivation and Ego Depletion: If you resist unwanted thoughts out of extrinsic motivation, then you will have trouble keeping them away if your ego becomes depleted by exerting effort to adhere to extrinsic motivations.

4) Intrinsic motivation and unconscious goal seeking: If the thoughts that you seek to banish are actually in line with intrinsic motivation, then there may be unconscious processes going on that are driving you in the direction of those consciously banished thoughts.

5) Priming effect: When we encounter an external reminder or experience a memory or thought that relates to a goal, either conscious or unconscious, we are more likely to seek that goal.

6) Out of the public eye: If we have worn out our will power on extrinsic motivations, and have been avoiding an intrinsically desirable thought, that thought will come into our mind unbidden. If we are out of the public eye and in a position to act upon that hidden desire, the odds are we will be tempted and might succumb to acting on that thought.

7) Smart people do stupid things: And so, we may find ourselves doing that very thing that we publicly denounced and consciously tried to avoid, much to our surprise and horror.

Then all that is left is for the fulfillment of our hidden desires to become public knowledge. And people are left shaking their heads and saying “How could he be that stupid?” The answer lies in the way the human mind deals with “I should” and “I want”.

Below the surface

Freud popularized the idea of a powerful unconscious of repressed desired and fears that could override our conscious control. More recently, psychology has developed a theory of sophisticated unconscious processing mechanisms that provide the foundation for our conscious experiences.

Unconscious Mind

There has been a lot of debate about the relationship of the conscious mind to the unconscious mind. The metaphor of a beast and a rider has often been invoked to show the relationship between the two. There is an ancient set of Japanese woodcuts that chronicle the quest for understanding and control of the unconscious as the search for a bull.

Ten Bulls

INTERACTION OF THE CONSCIOUS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS:

So how do the conscious and unconscious minds interact? An chapter in a book entitled “The New Unconscious” contains a section that breaks it down like this:

Multiprocessing: Control and Automatic Processes can Run in Parallel

The conscious mind handles experiences while the unconscious mind goes about the business of maintaining the many subprocesses that are necessary for normal functioning.

Delegation: A Control Process Can Launch an Automatic Process:

You consciously trigger an automatic process. Like tying a shoe or serving a tennis ball, you tell yourself to do something and then get out of the way.

Orienting: An Automatic Process Can Launch A Conscious Process

You are driving along a familiar road and thinking about something else when all of a sudden you come upon an accident and your conscious mind returns to your driving.

Intrusion: An Automatic Process Can Override A Control Process

You are reaching for a pot that has been sitting on the stove but you don’t realize that it is hot. As soon as you touch it, your system yanks your hand back automatically.

Regulation: A Control Process Can Override An Automatic Process

You are driving to your new house but you absent mindedly start to turn down the street that leads to your old house. You catch yourself and continue on the route to your new place.

Automatization: A Control Process Can Be Transformed Into An Automatic Process

You rehearse a golf swing over and over again, paying attention to every movement until you get it right and it becomes automatic.

Disruption: An Automatic Process Can Be Transformed Into A Control Process

You have a bad habit of reacting negatively to any criticism. You work at consciously stopping your automatic reaction and carefully considering and reacting appropriately to feedback.

THE FOUR MINDS:

In the descriptions above, the term “control refers to conscious processes”. In the concepts discussed next, “control” is a more general term that can refer to either conscious or unconscious processes.

Pavlovian Controller:

Fast but inflexible controller of subconscious instincts and conditioned habits.

Goal-Directed Controller:

Slow but flexible controller of conscious consideration and rational decision-making.

Episodic Controller:

Faster but more primitive controller which applies remembered solutions to situations.

Habitual Controller:

Fast subconscious controller that deals with learned behavior that has become automatic.

HYPERBOLIC DISCOUNTING:

We have all experience the weighing of immediate gratification against delaying satisfaction. The initials SMS and LML were coined for Small-Reward-Sooner vs Larger-Reward-Later as shorthand for these situations. children who are able to delay gratification at grow into adults who have better impulse control in their lives. I have played around with an equation that encapsulates a number of related concepts about time, value, goals, motivation, etc.

M = (I * P)/(E * D)

M = motivation
I = importance
P = probability
E = effort
D = delay

The basic idea is that the importance of the reward and the probability of achieving the goal increase motivation while increasing effort and increasing delay diminish motivation.

A researcher named Ainslie in the book: Breakdown of the Will has uncovered additional information about exactly how this works. He found that we tend to discount future rewards in a hyperbolic curve. In other words, the motivation strength of a reward falls off rapidly at first and then tapers off more gradually.

The power of an immediately available reward is very strong. A near term reward is much weak but a longer term reward is still close to the near term in strength. We often perform these calculations unconsciously. With respect to controlling our impulses, if we can avoid situations that contain the possibility of an immediate gratification of an undesired impulse, we can often deal with near term temptation.

WHAT AM I DOING?

There is a body of research now that shows that the unconscious mind is fully capable of having its own goals and pursuing them outside of your conscious awareness. This pursuit can be powerful, sophisticated, persevering, adaptable and capable of resuming after interruptions. Studies involving patients who have had the connections between the two hemispheres of their brain severed show that people can be motivation to complex action outside of conscious awareness. When they are asked why they acted the way that they did, they fabricated explanations for their actions that were totally false with out being aware of their self-deception.

LAST WORDS

A friend once asked me what words of advice I could give him from my many years of study and experience to share with the son of a friend he was going to visit. He said that I had ten words or less to condense my wisdom. I thought for a moment and then said, “I can do it in two. Be aware.” The unconscious mind is absolutely critical to functioning in the world but it is important to understand what it is up to.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time pondering the self; both my personal self and the general abstract notion of a self. I realized that identity was more of an activity than a thing. Your “identity” has a lot to do with what you “identify” with. When people are asked to write down some things that identify them, the responses tend to fall into categories such as attributes, activities, associates, possessions, places, abstract principles, etc. The following is a survey of some of the different types of selves we seem to have.

TYPES OF SELVES

Here are a few different types of self concept:

The Conscious Self:

This is the self that you think that you are.

The Unconscious Self:

This is the self of habit and unconscious processes.

The Feared Self:

This is the self that you are afraid that you might become under unfortunate circumstances and/or wrong choices.

The Desired Self:

This is the self that you would like to be and may be striving to become.

The Ought Self:

This is the self that you think you ought to be.

The Presented Self:

This is the self that you consciously construct and present to the world.

The Actual Self:

This is the self that you actually are.

The Remembered Self:

This is the self that you recall being.

The Anticipated Self:

This is the self that you expect to become.

THE REAL SELF?

Thomas Metzinger doesn’t think that you actually have a real self. His idea is that we all have a self model in our heads. We also have a model of the world in our heads. We use these models to navigate through life but get confused when we think that the model self is real in a fundamental sense.

THE INTELLIGENT SELVES:

Howard Gardner has a model of intelligence that is based on the following criteria for each identified type of intelligence:

There must be an identifiable brain area involved.

There must be a standard developmental process.

There must be cross cultural recognition

There must be examples of over and under development.

With these standards, he identified the following types:

Linguistic – this has to do with verbal expression and understanding.

Visual – this has to do with visual perception of color, shape, space, etc.

Musical – this has to do with creating and understanding music.

Bodily – this has to do with the operation of the physical body.

Social – this has to do with social interaction.

Personal – this has to do with understanding and handling one’s own self.

Logical/Mathematical – this has to do with understanding and manipulating abstract patterns.

Systemic – this has to do with understanding the way that things interact in a systemic fashion – global perspective

Naturalistic – this has to do with the appreciating and understanding the natural environment.

I have had a lot of fun over the years thinking about this model. In the context of this post, it occurs to me that we could consider a self for each type of intelligence.

Linguistic Self: This would be a collection of words that you use to define yourself. Primarily abstract and descriptive.

Visual Self: This is your actual visual appearance

Musical Self: This is not so easy to pin down. Would this be the style of music that you identify with?

Body Self: This would be things like your physical capabilities such as skills, range of motion, strength, endurance, etc.

Social Self: This would overlap with the Presented Self mentioned above and the.

Personal Self: This would be who you are to yourself – maybe the Conscious Self mentioned above.

Logical/Mathematical Self: Maybe this has to do with the coherence and consistency of your self concept.

Systemic Self: The degree to which you perceive yourself as a functional system in a world of systems.

Naturalistic Self: Who you are as a member of the ecosystem, interacting with plants and animals.

THE HIERARCHICAL SELF:

J.L. Jolly proposed a model of the world he called the Holotheme – based on a series of hierarchical levels of reality.

His levels are:

Informational – this level deals with information as the basic “stuff” of reality – more primordial than matter-energy-space-time. There are some theories of physics which propose such a level – they call it “pre-geometrical”

Space/Time – this is the curved space-time of Einstein – which he said was more basic than energy.

Energy – this is the realm of the different types of energies and forces.

Matter – this is the periodic table of elements and all of their combinations.

Simple Biology – this level consists of all single cellular creatures.

Complex Biology – this is the level of all multicelled creatures

Social – this is the level of societies of creatures.

Once again, we could consider the self at each level.

The Informational Self would be your portion of the fundamental information. Maybe this is the avenue for some of the paranormal phenomena.

The Space/Time Self would be the space/time that you encompass.

The Energetic Self would be the patterns of energy that are you. The idea of auras and subtle short range interactions fits here.

The Material Self would be all the atoms and molecules in you. They say that every atom in you gets replaced within seven years.

The Simple Biological Self would be all the cells that make you up. It turns out that there are many more independent bacteria in your body than human cells.

The Complex Biological Self is your primate self. An animal among animals.

The Social Self is the person you are to those around you, your roles and responsibilities to others.

THE COMPOSITE SELF:

Everyone models the people they interact with. This helps them anticipate the probable actions and reactions of those they associate with. So you have a different self for everyone who knows you. And each of those selves is a simplified model of you from their perspective. Not only do they use those models to anticipate your probable behavior, they also use those models to influence your probable behavior. Such phrases as “you are better than that”, “that isn’t like you”, “you want to do the right thing, don’t you?”, “you want people to think well of you, don’t you”, etc. illustrate this influence. We cannot help but be affected by all this.

THE INSTITUTIONAL SELF:

Each of us is involved in a variety of institutions. In some, we are only customers and audience member. In others we are workers and in some, we may be leaders. Each of these social roles suggests self structure that is consistent with the institution, its goals, history, traditions, activities, etc. Hopefully, these roles do not conflict in an individual, but often they do.

THE CONCENTRIC SELF:

Each of us has a strong identification with our body. We have a strong identification with family and friends. We have a looser identification with neighbors, co-workers, club members. We have a still lesser identification with people who live in our city, state, nation, etc. Sort of like layers of an onion. We differ from each other in the groups that we identify with and how strong that identification is. In a few, the personal body centered self is most important and all the rest are insignificant. In a few others, all humanity is revered. And in others we call mystics; all of reality becomes part of their sense of self.

THE FRAGMENTED SELF:

I have read a number of books on multiple personalities and it is a really fascinating subject. Often linked to severe childhood abuse, apparently the personality spawns a surrogate self and walls it off like a callous to absorb the abuse. Some people have a few personalities, others have many. Some of the personalities can monitor the experience of the one controlling the body and other personalities just blank out when they are not in control. I have read about cases where allergies, glasses prescriptions, even some aspects of personal appearance change when the personality in control shifts. I have wondered if we don’t all have some degree of differentiation of self and that those with pathological multiples are at one end of a spectrum while those with no differentiation at all are viewed as flat and boring personalities.

THE LAYERED SELF:

Dan McAdams has been working on a theory for 15 years which focuses on the power of narrative in the construction of the self. He postulates 3 la

The Basic Self:

This layer contains the genetics, the basic traits, the unconscious habits that are usually studied in relationship to the self.

The Constructed Self:

This layer is composed of the personal adaptations like the personal goals, the defenses, coping mechanisms, beliefs, values that people use to function in the world.

The Narrative Self;

This is a very interesting idea. He says that each of us constructs a story that makes sense of our life by rearranging memories, perceptions and anticipations into a coherent narrative or “life myth”.

THE INSTITUTIONAL SELF

There are different types of institutions that cover various human activities. Each contains multiple roles for the self.

Family

These are the most common and familiar roles. Each of us can be child, parent, mate, sibling, etc.

Educational

Whether formal or informal, each of us are students who learn and teachers who instruct at some times in our lives.

Economic

We all wind up in the market place sooner or later as buyers and/or seller. And to earn the money needed to do the buying we are workers and/or the boss.

Political

Every community has some sort of political structure and we are followers and leaders.

Religion

Whether devout or casual, most of us participate in some religious activity as either the minister or the parishioner.

Health

As some time in our lives, through illness or injury we are the patient under the care of a healer.

Recreational

All work and no play, etc. We are the audiences and the artists, the teams and the coachs in our “spare” time.

Science

Some of us are drawn to explore nature and/or design and build. We are the experimenters, the engineers, the theoreticians, the technicians,etc.

WRAPPING IT UP:

The self is sort of a “suitcase” concept that contains many different things. There is a concept called self-conguence. It refers to the way in which these different selves relate to each other. The more harmonious and integrated the different selves, the healthier and happier the individual. The more conflicted and confused the different selves, the more stressed and unhappy the individual.

Most people don’t think too much about their “self” unless they have a problem with . After years of considering these different selves, I think that maybe they have a point.

 

It seems to me that if we have an experience of something, even if we don’t remember it, it still leaves a residue that makes it easier for us to respond to and to believe something that resonates with the original experience. I was thinking about the Garden of Eden the other day and how it serves as a metaphor for a loss of something very important. I began to list the different experiences in the individual and the species that could contribute to a sense of “Things used to be better”. Here are some items from that list in roughly chronological order.

 

There was the development of language and awareness of self as separate from the other animals. This was a conceptual fall that accompanied the bigger and more sophisticated brains developed by our ancestors. A real loss of innocence.

 

Along with the development of language, we became aware of our own mortality and could anticipate our own death. The impact on the individual and on the group must have been enormous, another loss of innocence.

 

There was a massive volcanic eruption about 70,000 years ago. The climate changed in Africa, the original home of humanity. One of the results was the exodus of some humans from Africa into the wider world.

 

From about 70,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago, there was a warm spell between ice ages. Then the ice returned. But the memory of the warm and lush landscape was persevered in myths and legends.

 

When the hunter gatherers became farmers, they must have missed the casual nomadic life and preserved the memory in myths and legends. This may be the Garden that we were banished from.

 

When villages became cities, life was more interesting but much more complex. In the tribal villages, everyone worked together for survival. There was an intimacy and immediacy that disappeared when cities were born. Now people could not personally know everyone in the village, they had to rely on stereo types. No longer would feedback from friends and family guide behavior, there now had to be laws and enforcers. Villagers moving into the city would remember the simplicity and intimacy of the village life with nostalgia.

 

Archeology of the Middle East records some of first walled cities, weapons, evidence of slavery and other unsavory aspects of the ancient world. There is also evidence of repeated and severe climate change. It is not too difficult to see that when the rain fall dropped and the sun burned the earth, times got tough. And you built walls, forged weapons and killed or subjugated others to survive. The image of the flaming sword at the gates of Eden may have been a memory of the merciless sun that accompanied the drought. Of course, the survivors would lament the passing of the rain and the verdant landscape of yesterday.

 

Many civilizations have risen and fallen. Those who survived the collapse of a civilization would pass stories of the sophisticated and rich society that was gone to those born after the collapse. These stories would continue to be passed down from generation to generation as part of a nearly universal myth of the vanished Golden Age.

 

Before birth, life is good. Everything is provided and there are no demands for effort. The womb is flooded with endorphins. Somewhere at the base of our experience of self is the imprint of that wonderful time before expulsion from paradise into this world.

 

After childhood, when we have to work to survive, we remember the carefree days of youth.

 

As time passes, we tend to remember the positive events in our lives and to forget the negative events. This results in seeing the past as “better” than the present.

 

And as we get older, our senses fade and the world becomes less intense. We mellow emotionally. We recall the intensity and positive experiences of old. We mourn the loss of our own personal “Golden Age”.

 

So there are many reasons both for our species and ourselves to feel that “Things used to be better”.