Human Creations

Humans create a lot of things.  We build houses, furniture, buildings of commerce, industry, and worship.  We create music and musical instruments, works of art, and stories.  Many of these are concrete things: things we build with our hands by refining natural objects and putting them together in structures that take up space.  Some of these things are abstract: music, poetry, plays and movies, which are mostly enjoyable diversions or information we deem important to remember. But of all the things we create, I believe the most important things are the artifacts of cooperation.

Artifacts of cooperation are groupings that we belong to and work together for a common goal.  For the family, the common goal is making basic life easier for the members of the family.  Families can also give us immortality, in that we my die, but our offspring will carry on. Businesses are another artifact of cooperation, were people band together to produce something of need for exchange.  Businesses and families are sometimes intertwined, as in a family business. Religions are artifacts of cooperation where we promote a common belief system.  Governments are also artifacts cooperation, where we band together to provide for a common defense, common welfare, and system of justice.  And finally, markets are artifacts of cooperation where people and businesses can exchange items of need.

The thing that all of these things have in common, is that they all arise spontaneously.  Throughout history, and most likely for hundreds of thousands of year before history, we can imagin all of these artifacts come into being in surprisingly similar circumstance.  I believe that we can tell a lot about ourselves by examining these artifacts, Just as we can tell what our size is by the shape of our furniture.

The family is probably the oldest of these artifacts, in that originally the family was a religion, a government, a business, and a market.  Certainly our level of trust will always be higher with people that look like us, and families tend to look alike.  Trust is a primary promoter of cooperation.  Familiarity between parent and child, and between siblings also promotes trust.  We need trust so that we feel fairly treated, as we specialize our work, so that the sibling that grinds grain feels they do an equivalent amount of work as the sibling that reaps it.  Specializing allows us to gain expertise, at the expense of our interdependence.  As long as we are willing to see the bigger picture, and understand that specialization along with cooperation gives us an advantage over families that are less cooperative, we may be more willing to subjugate our independence, especially if there is a high level of trust that all members of the group are being treated fairly. So here is our first balance that humans face: work with the group for a greater good, or work for yourself with less effect, but more independence.  Of course, at the family level, striking out on your own, especially in primitive times would be a pretty scary adventure, so the balance is highly tilted towards working within the family group.

Fear is also a motivation, but it does not produce cooperation, only a temporary willingness to work towards a common goal.  Once the fear is lifted, the willingness disappears, and there will always be less willingness as there is with trust based cooperation.  In addition fear as a motivation may backfire if the fearful can band together in cooperation to overcome what they are fearful of.  But history if filled with great accomplishments that were supposedly created by using fear as a motivation.  So our second balance: Motivate with fear, or motivate with trust.

So trust and cooperation are intimately linked.  The higher levels of trust, the more cooperation you will find between people.  People are ultimately a social animal, and tend to feel comfortable and even enjoy banding together.  Of course the family is the primary band, since they are necessarily co-located at least for a certain span of time.  When one family meets another family in a primitive situation, mistrust and hostility are like to occur.  So I would imagine that families tended to keep their distance.  Of course we also have a natural dis-like of mating with close family members, so nearby families may have banded together as members chose mates from the neighboring family.  This may have promoted cooperation between families.  One might even imagine that our dislike of mating with close family members is an evolutionary artifact of the increased cooperation that inter-breeding between nearby families brings.  That brings us to our third balance: cooperate with nearby families, or compete with them.  This is similar to the first balance, except that this balance is made as groups not as an individual decision, and the balance is probably tilted at first towards competition.

Markets are probably the next artifact of cooperation to arise.  Families still probably held monopolies on religion and government.  But as families began to specialize, there is a motivation to cooperate based on needs, especially the covetous need we all have for things that other people have.  So if one family is located near the shore, and the other family is located in the hills, the two families may desire to exchange fish for berries.  It might be more effective at first to simply go kill the shoreline family and take their fish, or use fear to take if from them.  But killing them means they won't fish anymore, and the issues of fear were discussed above.  Eventually the logic of cooperation created the market, which may not have been an actual place, but simply some agreed upon circumstance in which to exchange goods.  Again it is a building of trust that allows us to cooperate.  The trust involved is that the effort involved in make some item is equivalent to the level of effort involved in the item exchanged for.  The evolution of complex language probably coincided with the evolution of the market, just as writing and arithmetic started simply as an expedient for commerce.

Thousands of years pass, language is thriving and people have become used to having markets of exchange, that is more effective in the long term, as an alternative to conflict and plunder.  Trust in this system of exchange grows with every generation, and the network of exchange becomes more extensive.  But conflict still exists, fairness of exchange is questioned, families still have disagreements among themselves over areas of control or fights between members of separate families.  During this time complex language probably evolved from strictly an artifact of exchange, to recalling events and a medium of transmitting knowledge.

Language inflames disagreements as now we have a medium of building consensus by describing the offending infractions.  This new tool of complex language probably initially increases the amount of conflict, lowers trust, and shrinks the networks of exchange.  But it probably also brings a longing for the past (probably an idealized past) by recounting the days when exchange was free and open, and the current level of conflict didn't exist.  At some point we probably learned to use language as a medium of resolving conflict between families.  It was probably an extrapolation of use of language to resolve conflicts within the family.  The heads of each family with a pending conflict may decide that mutual destruction is probable should conflict boil over, and get together to resolve the conflict with language.

Thousands of more years pass, and the stories that we use to transmit knowledge become filled with circumstances when mass destruction was avoided by family heads resolving conflict through dialog.  Just as the tool of complex language probably initially created chaos, it eventually brought a new level of order to humanity.  The idea of family heads getting together probably became a more formal affair as a medium for conflict avoidance, and allowing a family group to speak with one voice.  Now we have an embryonic government.  As conflict between families decreased, trust and cooperation increased.  The market network web increased again, and also became more formalized.  Certain locations became customary meeting places for family heads and market exchange.  This is the birth of the city.

Family heads were probably also the primary proponent for the families religious activities.  As family heads gathered, there were probably also an exchange of religious ideas, and religion was freed from the confines of the family and becomes a function of the government.  The decisions that were made by the family heads together would be sanctioned by the spirit world.

That is my story of the possible evolution of each of these artifacts.  Each provides for some element of human nature.  Families, religion and government provide for conflict resolution and achieving goals beyond what the individual can achieve.  Business and markets allow for specialization which allows increased levels of expertise by individuals and increased interdependence.  People are by nature social animals, but have built-in tendencies for conflict.  People are spiritual in that they imagine things not perceived with the senses, and hold them to be real.  People are ambitious and covetous and wish to produce needed things, and exchange them for novel items.

Families, religion, government, business, and markets are the creations of mankind.  They are as real as the buildings that we inhabit or the roads that we travel.  They arise out of our needs and are uniquely shaped to the human condition.  They have evolved over thousands of years to the state they are at now.  Any attempt to change them needs to take the needs that created them into consideration or it will eventually fail.

Family and religion are intensely personal artifacts and have no place in a general philosophy, but must be part of a personal philosophy.  As such I believe there is no room for debate about family or religious practices that do not encroach on the domain of the other three.  So, for example, government should not interfere with religious practices, unless they include, say, human sacrifice, as the common welfare of the people is within the domain of government.  The other three, government, business, and markets, because they impact us all are fair game for a general philosophy.

In a future blog I will be analyzing government, business, and markets as the three global creations of mankind, and presenting a general philosophy that can guide our understanding of each of them and provide a rational view that incorporates the needs that they fulfill, and tries to balance the conflicts they can create.

Ethical Logic

I have often said that there is no 'logic center' in the human brain.  That is in response to comparing our thinking to that of a computer.  A computer has a logic center that can add numbers, compare numbers and other numerical manipulations.  We have nothing like that, though we are able to be taught to perform those operations.  My statement is also in response to the general query 'why can't people just be logical'.  Even very smart people can be notoriously illogical at times, usually falling prey to one of the many fallacies that plague our thinking.  Fallacies such as over generalization is an obvious by-product of our inductive reasoning gone awry.  But there are other Fallacies that are harder to explain, such as the one I call the 'external agent' fallacy, where we attribute unexplained phenomenon to various entities such as luck, gods, devils, or other supernatural agents. this has been a component of human nature since the beginning of time, and still exists today. One aspect of the external agent fallacy, is the idea of judgement of our actions by supernatural agents, and reward or retribution for our actions.  This implies that we have some idea of what is right and wrong.
 
Just like addition and subtraction, the idea of right and wrong is mostly learned, but there is probably a core of ethical reasoning built into us, just as we have a core of inductive reasoning.  Our core ethics come from our empathic feelings, our ability to see through another's eyes and have sympathy for them.  If there is a logic core to our brains it is in our ability to conjure up an ideal model of a situation, and compare that to reality by which we can arrive at a judgement of whether the real situation is good or bad.  Built into our brains are the addition circuits that add up all aspects of some circumstance, and then compares the sum to some idealized outcome.

This idealized outcome depends on whom the circumstances effect.  Also built into our thinking is the concept of 'us' and 'them'.  Idealized outcomes for 'us' is usually what we would like to see happen to ourselves.  Idealized outcomes for 'them' is anything except what we would like to see happen to ourselves, the exact nature being left to the imagination.  This idea is easily and intuitively aligned with evolution of our species as a social animal, that is, one that depends on cooperation to succeed.  In our governments and other social structures we often strive to wrestle with nature to produce idealized outcomes, to reward the virtuous, punish the wicked, and help the downtrodden despite natures observable indifference.

Difficult ethical questions, such as 'would you pull the lever to divert a train from hitting a group of people to a track with only a single person' cause conflict in our ethical logic.  In brain-scanning studies of people who are asked to make similar decisions finds that different area of the brain are in conflict about what to do.  The study also makes the claim that they can predict what decision a person will make based on which area is more active (the study appeared in a recent edition of scientific american or scientific american mind, but I'm too lazy to search through my back issues, so finding the reference is left as an exercise for the student).

So we have an ethical logic process that allows us to make ethical decisions, idealize ethically correct outcomes, compare the ideal outcomes to reality and make ethical judgments. The only problems we face are other fallacies that allow us to favor behavior that benefits us, and our innate concept of 'them', for which our empathy and ethics do not apply.

I believe that if we try, we can overcome our concept of 'them', especially if we start at an early age emphasizing  that we are all one people.  We have all heard of anecdotal stories of soldiers in war time, who may kill without thought most of the time, but who finds some situation in which an enemy soldier suddenly becomes familiar and guilt for the killing manifests itself.  We have the ability to see all people as we see ourselves, but our cultures still differentiate and serve to fan the flames of animosity, and negates our innate ethical behavior.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote 'All men are created equal' it was only applied to white land-owning individuals.  However the act of writing it down gave it a life of it's own with it's inescapable logic: that it applied to women and people of color and to all people on earth.  Slowly over the centuries we see the 'us' becoming more and more inclusive, and I believe that it is inevitable that us will become all-inclusive, at least on a formal level, if not individually respected, and those that wish to divide us will be shamed into inaction.

While I do believe that we can make our concept of us all inclusive, I don't believe in any Utopian brotherhood of man, there will always be conflict.  Even with our ethical logic, we tend to be programmed to favor our own interests slightly (or greatly for 'selfish' people).  This self bias tends to balance itself out because everyone has it, but it implies conflict and rules and processes for resolving them.

There is a logic for ethics which is simple and intuitive: cooperation tends to be more successful than individual endeavors. This is a logical basis for ethical behavior.  Religion, as so many wish to believe, is not necessary for ethics, except that our 'external agent' cognitive bias manifests a fear of uncooperative behavior. But the logic exists without our conscious manifestation of our social tendencies.  So good and evil can be defined in terms of cooperative behavior and uncooperative behavior.  Ultimately, good always wins as cooperation is more efficient, even though evil sometimes wins individual battles.  But as long as we have us and them built into our thinking, one man's good will be another man's evil.

Because cooperation tends to be more successful than individual action, and our governments are the agents of our cooperation, we as a people tend to prosper when our governments are more pro-active about organizing projects that benefit us all.  It was this spirit of cooperation that put a man on the moon, and gave us the foundations of the Internet.  Unfortunately this spirit of cooperation seems to only be active in the face of a real threat.  Without a unifying force, our actions tend to meander and cancel each other out, and only outstanding individuals can have any success.  But these successes pale in comparison to what we can do if we can be of a single mind about some project.

And finally, my identification of the 'external agent' fallacy does not preclude the existence of some external agent(s).  We know not what exists outside of the realm of our existence, and the existence of our belief in some external agent may be a shadow of the hand of God.  Or it may just be an odd character defect, the choice is yours.