Why Buddhism is True - Robert Wright

is the struggle for enduring peace also the struggle for truth?

It would be nice to know that when people pursue the path to liberation - ...- they are helping humanity broadly, that the quest for individual salvation advances the quest for social salvation.

feelings are said to be true of false depending on whether they align with their evolutionary purpose. If the feelings promote well-being they are considered good or true; if they lead to things that are ultimately bad for a person, then we could say they are false.

environmental mismatch = a feeling designed by natural selection that is true in one natural environment, but false in another.

natural selection didn't design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

false positive - you take remedial action even when its not called for

1. Our feelings weren't designed to depict reality accurately even in our natural environment.
2. The fact that we're not living in a "natural' environment makes our feeling even less reliable guides to reality.
3. Underlying it all is the happiness delusion. The longing for happiness itself is a delusion that leaves us with a desire for more of what we think makes up happy.

'The cost of survival might be a lifetime of discomfort'   Aaron Beck - Cognitive Therapy and The Emotional Disorders.

One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally "designed" to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively.

default mode network - a network in the brain that remains active when you're doing nothing. It is the network our mind wanders when it is wandering. What you're not doing in the default mode is focusing on the present moment. It is easy to overcome the default mode by participating in a task that requires active concentration.

concentration meditation = focus one's concentration on breath, a mantra, a visual image, a bodily sensation, a physical sound.

mindfulness meditation = experiencing whatever you are experiencing.

enlightenment - ridding yourself of the illusion of what is going on inside yourself, and outside of yourself.
asymptote  - something you can get closer to but never quite reach.

insight = apprehending the 3 marks of existence: impermanence, suffering or unsatisfactoriness, and non-self.

deeply realizing that you are selfless - ...- can make you selfless in the more familiar sense of the term.

self - control, persists through time

in the deepest sense the self doesn't exist, human language isn't very good at describing reality at the deepest level. So as a practical matter - as a linguistic convention - we have to talk about there being an I and a you and a he and a she. In other words, the self doesn't exist in an "untimate" sense, but it exists in a "conventional" sense.

The Buddha believed that the less you judge things - including the contents of your mind - the more clearly you'll see them, and the less deluded you'll be.

We think we're better than average at not being biased in thinking that we're better than average.

So, all told, we're under at least two kinds of illusions. One is about the nature of the conscious self, which we see as more in control of things than it actually is. The other illusion is about exactly what kind of people we are - namely, capable and upstanding. You might call these two misconceptions the illusion about our selves and the illusion about ourselves.

benneffectance - the tendency to take credit for success, while denying responsibility for failure.

modular mind - the mind is composed of lots of specialized modules... and it's the interplay among these modules that shapes your behavior. And much of this interplay happens without conscious awareness.

three ways you shouldn't conceive of modules:

1. the modules aren't like a bunch of physical compartments.
2. The different modules aren't like the blades on a Swiss Army knife or the apps on a smartphone.
3. The modules aren't like departments in a company's organization chart.

Feelings aren't just little parts of the thing you had thought of as the self; they are closer to its core; they are doing  what you had thought "you" were doing: calling the shots.

Theory of Mind = thinking about what other people are thinking.

Psychologists who adhere to the modular model of the mind tend toward the idea that the conscious you isn't choosing the different modules so much as being commandeered by the modules that have prevailed....
Thoughts are directed toward what we think is the conscious mind... the conscious mind doesn't create thoughts, it receives them.

modules = attracting mates, keeping mates, enhancing your status, taking care of kin, tending to friendships, etc.

feelings are the things that give a particular module greater influence... "Every thought has a propellant, and that propellant is emotional." Akincano Marc Weber. Feelings are judgments about how various things relate to an animal's Darwinian interests.... feelings are the glue that makes thoughts stick to your consciousness.

Self Control - reason prevailing over feelings. "Reason alone," Hume argued, "can never oppose passion in the direction of the will." Nothing "can oppose or retard the impulse of passion but a contrary impulse."

both the problems we call therapeutic and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly.

Global Wealth Report 2017

Global Wealth Report 2017

Wealth per adult across countries
Switzerland (USD 537,600), Australia (USD 402,600) and the United States (USD 388,600) continue to occupy the first three positions in the ranking of wealth per adult .... The ranking by median wealth per adult
favors countries with lower levels of wealth inequality and produces a somewhat different ranking.  In contrast, high wealth inequality pushes Denmark (USD 87,200) out of the top ten list, while median wealth of USD 55,900 relegates the United States to 21st place, alongside Austria and Greece

Once debts have been subtracted, a person needed only USD 3,582 to be among the wealthiest half of
world citizens in mid-2017. However, USD 76,754 is required to be a member of the top 10% of global
wealth holders, and USD 770,368 to belong to the top 1%. While the bottom half of adults collectively
own less than 1% of total wealth, the richest decile (top 10% of adults) owns 88% of global assets, and the top percentile alone accounts for half of total household wealth.


Monitoring world wealth
Wealth is a key component of the economic system, valued as a source of finance for future consumption
particularly in retirement, and for reducing vulnerability to shocks such as unemployment, ill health, or natural disasters. Wealth also enhances opportunities for informal sector and entrepreneurial activities, when used either directly or as collateral for loans. These functions are less important in countries that have generous state pensions, adequate social safety nets, good public healthcare, high-quality public education, and well-developed business finance...Valued at current exchange rates, total global wealth increased by USD 16.7 trillion, or 6.4%, in the year to mid-2017. Controlling for exchange rate movements, the rise was a little larger, at USD 18.9 trillion. The United States again led the way with a gain of USD 8.5 trillion, most arising from financial assets. Elsewhere, however, the gains derived primarily from non-financial assets.

Wealth varies greatly across individuals in every part of the world. Our estimates suggest that the lower
half of global adults collectively owns less than 1% of global wealth, while the richest 10% of adults own
88% of all wealth and the top 1% account for half of all global assets.

Waking Up - Sam Harris

paradox of spiritual seeking = the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self - and to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one's apparent bondage in each moment.

the urge to attain self-transcendence or any other mystical experience is a symptom of the very disease we want to cure.

Consciousness is already free of anything that remotely resembles a self - and there is nothing that you can do, as an illusory ego, to realize this.

most effort arises from the very illusion of bondage that one is seeking to overcome.
[If bondage to the self is an illusion, then how can mindfulness of the illusion free one from the bondage, the bondage was never real]

If freedom is possible, there must be some mode of ordinary consciousness in which it can be expressed?

[If "I" am going to die, who or what is the "I" that is going to die?]

"The mind is a bundle of thoughts. The thoughts arise because there is a thinker. The thinker is the ego. The ego, if sought, will automatically vanish." Ramana Maharshi

[ mind = thoughts (caused by) thinker; therefore, if thinker is sought, thinker vanishes, and thoughts vanish. If thoughts are sought, thoughts vanish and thinker vanishes]

Direct method = Reality is simply the loss of the ego. Destroy the ego by seeking its identity. Because ego is no entity it will automatically vanish and reality will shine forth by itself.

[the problem is reality is not simply the loss of the ego. In fact, the ego, the thinker, and the thoughts produced are an intricate part of the fabric of reality]

Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling "I," and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness - free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.

Today, a red-golden leafs falls aimlessly to the ground,
only yesterday, it seems, it was a green bud in spring
that clung tenaciously to its tree for life
deriving its essence and giving back sustenance;
Only, tragically, it seems, to finally release its grip.
Blown, raked, and swept into a pile,
it is, seemingly, no more clinging or falling.
Looking back, it seems, it was only an illusion.
a thing, seemingly, that once never was.
a thing, seemingly, forever no more.
pondering a leaf, it seems the illusion is only an illusion.

thinking about what is beyond thought is still thought... Being able to stand perfectly free of the feeling of self is the start of one's spiritual journey, not its end.
[a glimpse of selflessness is still self-ful. The only way to get a glimpse of selflessness is to be unaware of it.]

mindfulness must be synonymous with dispelling the illusion of the self....one "takes the goal as the path," freedom from self is the very thing one practices.

consciousness is intrinsically free of self... the truth of nonduality, once glimpsed, is obvious and always available. self transcendence is the experience that there is no self to transcend.

the implied center of cognition and emotion simply falls away, and it is obvious that consciousness is never truly confined by what it knows. That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful.

thoughts and emotions arise in consciousness the way that images appear on the surface of a mirror.

[consciousness is the mirror, you are consciousness, you are the mirror]

Meditation doesn't entail the suppression of thoughts, but it does require we notice them as they arise and that we recognize their transitory nature

consciousness is free. Meditation is the practice of of finding this freedom, by breaking one's identification with the thoughts and emotions that arise, and to experience them just as they are.

"I" am not even an ingredient, necessary or not, of my own mind, much less of the universe.

selflessness is not a deep feature of consciousness; it is on the surface.

If you are in pain, there is a simple way out. Accept the pain as it arises and do not fight it. It is a transitory experience.

“The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self”.  Albert Einstein

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”
Albert Einstein

boredom - is simply a lack of attention

many people renounce the world because they cannot find a place in it

there is only consciousness and its contents; there is no inner self who is conscious.

The truth is that, whatever happens after death, it is possible to justify a life of spiritual practice and self-transcendence without pretending to know things we do not know.

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness... Every waking moment - and even in our dreams - we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness we value.

the brain does exclude an extraordinary amount of information from consciousness.

One thing is certain: The mind is vaster and more fluid that our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests.

Happiness and suffering, however extreme, are mental events. The mind depends on the body, and the body upon the world, but everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter.

consciousness has no form because anything that would give it form must arise withing consciousness. Consciousness is simply the light which the contours of mind and body are known... Consciousness can appear to take shape for a time, but over time it is possible to recognize it never does.... Consciousness is itself divisible, as in the split-brain patients, but even in intact brains consciousness is blind and unaware of most of what the mind is doing. Everything we believe ourselves to be.... depends upon distinct processes that we are unaware of and don't fully understand, and are spread our over the whole brain.... The sense therefore that we are unified subjects - the unchanging thinker of our thoughts is an illusion. The self we experience can only be experienced in the present moment for it is a transitory experience. Each of us is identical to same principles that bring value to the universe

We are always and everywhere in the presence of reality. Indeed, the human mind is the most complex and subtle expression of reality that we have thus far experienced.

[There is nothing we think or do in this life or in this world, that can be undone in another life or another world. If there is a reality that is larger and more vast than the one we experience, then we are already a part of it.]

Power Laws and The State of Being Stuck

A power law is often represented by an equation with an exponent:

Y=MX^B

Each letter represents a number. Y is a function (the result); X is the variable (the thing you can change); B is the order of scaling (the exponent); and M is a constant (unchanging).

One of the characteristics of a complex system is that the behavior of the system differs from the simple addition of its parts... “the whole seems to take on a life of its own, almost dissociated from the specific characteristics of its individual building blocks.”  Geoffrey West

emergent behavior = collective outcome, in which a system manifests significantly different characteristics from those resulting from simply adding up all of the contributions of its individual constituent parts,

diminishing returns = the point where more input yields progressively less output

Future Value = (Present Value)(1+i)^n

https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/11/power-laws/

being stuck is part of the process.

“Then you have to stop,” Wiles said. “Let your mind relax a bit…. Your subconscious is making connections. And you start again—the next afternoon, the next day, the next week.”Patience, perseverance, acceptance—this is what defines a mathematician. (Andrew Wiles)

automaticity = monotonous productivity, a recipe, Method, the panacea, the answer key

grit = perseverance is a partly a matter of personality, of exhibiting the right characteristics: tenacity, determination, a sort of healthy native stubbornness. 

fixed mindset = one’s intelligence and abilities are unchanging, stable traits. 

growth mindset  = effort fuels progress. The harder you work, the more you’ll learn. To be stuck is a transient state, which you overcome with patience and persistence.

perseverance is neither about personality (as with grit) nor belief (as with mindset). Rather, it’s about emotion.

delicate emotions of discovery = the immense release, the inner fireworks, of solving a problem at last.

Zero to One - Peter Thiel

the more we compete, the less we gain.

Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive.

anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter. This twisted logic is part of human nature, but it’s disastrous in business. If you can
recognize competition as a destructive force instead of a sign of value, you’re already more sane than most.

a great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future ... Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future. (To properly value a business, you also have to discount those future cash flows to their present worth, since a given amount of money today is worth more than the same amount in the future.)...Comparing discounted cash flows shows the difference between low-growth businesses and highgrowth startups at its starkest. Most of the value of low-growth businesses is in the near term

For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, ... will this business still be around a decade from now? Numbers alone won’t tell you the answer; instead you must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business.

Every startup is small at the start. Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market....The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.

You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the
future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if
you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.

And monopoly businesses capture more value than millions of undifferentiated competitors

the power law—so named because exponential equations describe severely unequal distributions—is the law of the universe.

we don’t live in a normal world; we live under a power law

If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place.

The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.

since nobody wants to give up on an investment, VCs usually spend even more time on the most problematic companies than they do on the most obviously successful.

The power law is not just important to investors; rather, it’s important to everybody because everybody is an investor.

Religious fundamentalism, for example, allows no middle ground for hard questions: there are easy truths that children are expected to rattle off, and then there are the mysteries of God, which can’t be explained. In between—the zone of hard truths—lies heresy.

Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on: in a democratic
society, a wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust.

“if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” James Madison

anyone who doesn’t own stock options or draw a regular salary from your company is fundamentally misaligned.

A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups ... High pay incentivizes him to defend the status quo along with his salary, not to work with everyone else to surface problems and fix them aggressively. A cash-poor executive, by contrast, will focus on increasing the value of the company as a whole.

If a CEO doesn’t set an example by taking the lowest salary in the company, he can do the same thing
by drawing the highest salary. So long as that figure is still modest, it sets an effective ceiling on cash
compensation....high cash compensation teaches workers to claim value from the company as
it already exists instead of investing their time to create new value in the future. A cash bonus is
slightly better than a cash salary—at least it’s contingent on a job well done. But even so-called
incentive pay encourages short-term thinking and value grabbing. Any kind of cash is more about the
present than the future.... Equity is the one form of compensation that can effectively orient people toward
creating value in the future.

The most valuable kind of company maintains an openness to invention that is most characteristic

of beginnings. This leads to a second, less obvious understanding of the founding: it lasts as long as a

company is creating new things, and it ends when creation stops.

no company has a culture; every company is a culture

job assignments aren’t just about the relationships between workers and tasks; they’re also about relationships between employees.... Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to
build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism....every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an
autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.

The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is
that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are
fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

advertising matters because it works. It works on nerds, and it works
on you. You may think that you’re an exception; that your preferences are authentic, and advertising
only works on other people. It’s easy to resist the most obvious sales pitches, so we entertain a false
confidence in our own independence of mind. But advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product
right away; it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. Anyone who can’t
acknowledge its likely effect on himself is doubly deceived.

Sales is..: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality.

The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation.
The converse is not true.

Will a machine replace you?
Futurists can seem like they hope the answer is yes. Luddites are so worried about being replaced
that they would rather we stop building new technology altogether. Neither side questions the premise
that better computers will necessarily replace human workers. But that premise is wrong: computers
are complements for humans, not substitutes. The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be
built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.

people compete for jobs and for resources; computers compete for neither.

computers are far more different from people than any two people are different from each other: men and machines are good at fundamentally different things. People have intentionality—we form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We’re less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing, but they struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human

1. The Engineering Question
Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
2. The Timing Question
Is now the right time to start your particular business?
3. The Monopoly Question
Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
4. The People Question
Do you have the right team?
5. The Distribution Question
Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?
6. The Durability Question
Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?
7. The Secret Question
Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?

cleantech executives were running around wearing suits and ties. This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings.never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got us to the truth a lot faster. The best sales is hidden. There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech

Jesus Is Poor

Sometimes it is worth remembering that Jesus did not just take on poverty. He was poor. He was born homeless to poor parents in a poor country occupied by a foreign power. Like most poor people unable to escape their poverty He lived his whole life as a poor person; and, like most people who dare speak out, he was killed. In the end, he was buried the way so many poor people are buried, in unmarked graves. If there is a resurrection story, then the miracle is the fact that a poor person's story is being told at all, and even occasionally listened to.

The Illusion of Conscious Will - Daniel M. Wegner

The illusion of conscious will - Daniel M. Wegner

Will is a feeling. David Hume was sufficiently impressed by this idea that he proposed to define the will as “nothing but the internal impression we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind”

the will is not some cause or force or motor in a person, but rather is the personal conscious feeling of such causing, forcing, or motoring.

Intentions, plans, and other thoughts can be experienced, and still the action is not willed if the person says it was not.

Each of us is quite comfortable with using these two very different ways of thinking about and explaining events – a physical, mechanical way and a psychological, mental way. In the mechanical explanatory system, people apply intuitive versions of physics to questions of causality, and so they think about causes and effects as events in the world. In the mental explanatory system, in turn, people apply implicit psychological theories to questions of causality, focusing on issues of conscious thoughts and the experience of will as they try to explain actions

The real causal sequence underlying human behavior involves a massively complicated set of mechanisms... Each of our actions is really the culmination of an intricate set of physical and mental processes, including psychological mechanisms that correspond to the traditional concept of will – in that they involve linkages between our thoughts and our actions. This is the empirical will. However, we do not see this. Instead, we readily accept the far easier explanation of our behavior that our Houdini-esque minds present to us: We think we did it.

The mind creates this continuous illusion because it really doesn’t know what causes its actions...The mind has a self-explanation mechanism that produces a roughly continuous sense that what is in consciousness is the cause of action – the phenomenal will – whereas in fact the mind actually cannot ever know itself well enough to be able to say what the causes of its actions are

To quote Spinoza in The Ethics: “Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions”

 In the more contemporary phrasing of Minsky (1985, p. 306), “none of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control.... Perhaps it would be more honest to say, ‘My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand’”

The theory of apparent mental causation, then, is this: people experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action

 The real causes of human action are unconscious, so it is not surprising that behavior could often arise – as in automaticity experiments – without the person having conscious insight into its causation.... Such “controlled” processes may be less efficient than automatic processes and require more cognitive resources, but even if they occur along with an experience of control or conscious will, this experience is not a direct indication of their real causal influence. The experience of conscious will is just more likely to accompany inefficient processes than efficient ones because there is more time available prior to action for inefficient thoughts to become conscious, thus to prompt the formation of causal inferences linking thought and action.

Most of us think we understand the basic issue of free will and determinism. The question seems to be whether all our actions are determined by mechanisms beyond our control, or whether at least some of them are determined by our free choice

free will is a feeling, whereas determinism is a process. They are incommensurable.

The experience of will comes from having our actions follow our wishes, not from being able to do things that do not follow from anything. And, of course, we do not cause our wishes.

This deep intuitive feeling of conscious will is something that no amount of philosophical argument or research about psychological mechanisms can possibly dispel. Even though this experience is not an adequate theory of behavior causation, it needs to be acknowledged as an important characteristic of what it is like to be human.

Perhaps we have conscious will because it helps us to appreciate and remember what we are doing...Will, then, serves to accentuate and anchor an action in the body. This makes the action our own far more intensely than could a thought alone. Unlike simply saying “this act is mine,” the occurrence of conscious will brands the act deeply, associating the act with self through feeling, and so renders the act one’s own in a personal and memorable way. Will is a kind of authorship emotion

T. H. Huxley (1910) made the equation explicit: “Volition . . . is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes. . . . " Will is a feeling, not unlike happiness or sadness or anger or anxiety or disgust.... Still, will has other characteristics of emotion, including an experiential component (how it feels), a cognitive component (what it means and the thoughts it brings to mind), and a physiological component (how the body responds). Although conscious will is not a classic emotion that people would immediately nominate when asked to think of an emotion, it has much in common with the emotions.

The experience of consciously willing an action belongs to the class of cognitive feelings described by Gerald Clore (1992). He points out that there is a set of experiences such as the feeling of knowing, the feeling of familiarity, or even the feeling of confusion, that serve as indicators of mental processes or states, and that thus inform us about the status of our own mental systems.

Conscious will is the emotion of authorship, a somatic marker (Damasio 1994) that authenticates the action’s owner as the self. With the feeling of doing an act, we get a conscious sensation of will attached to the action. Often, this marker is quite correct. In many cases, we have intentions that preview our action, and we draw causal inferences linking our thoughts and actions in ways that track quite well our own psychological processes.

But however we do calculate our complicity in moral actions, we then experience the emotional consequences and build up views of ourselves as certain kinds of moral individuals as a result. We come to think we are good or bad on the basis of our authorship emotion. Ultimately, our experience of conscious will may have more influence on our moral lives than does the actual truth of our behavior causation.

Sometimes how things seem is more important than what they are. This is true in theater, in art, in used car sales, in economics, and, it now turns out, in the scientific analysis of conscious will as well. The fact is, it seems to each of us that we have conscious will. It seems we have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do. Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion, it is a mistake to conclude that the illusory is trivial. To the contrary, the illusions piled atop apparent mental causation are the building blocks of human psychology and social life. It is only with the feeling of conscious will that we can begin to solve the problems of knowing who we are as individuals, of discerning what we can and cannot do, and of judging ourselves morally right or wrong for what we have done

One key theme of the book is the analysis of automatisms – actions experienced as occurring without conscious will.

My body is causally responsible for whatever effects emanate from it, whether it is falling down a flight of stairs, or pulling the trigger of a gun, but I, the person “inhabiting” this body, am morally responsible only for my actions. Again, who is this person and what is he doing in my body?

"Brains – or functional subsystems of brains – don’t interpret anything, they don’t make any inferences, and they don’t exert control. Only whole persons can be directed at the meaning of certain sentences (or of sentences describing chains of internal events), thereby attempting to interpret them. Only whole persons could establish inferences between mentally represented propositions. And, only whole persons can be directed at the fulfillment conditions defining certain goal-states, that is, only whole persons can truly make an attempt at controlling a certain state of affairs."   Thomas Metzinger

 "Probably brains are even more than that, namely, complex dynamical systems exhibiting something like a “liquid” architecture."   Thomas Metzinger

"The “feeling” of will could then be not an illusion, but, rather, a nonconceptual form of selfknowledge – that is, the introspective knowledge that one right now is a system undergoing the internal transformation just described." Thomas Metzinger

"We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are" Anais Nin

This is true because the experience of conscious will is involved in the creation of the self. The feeling of doing establishes a “doer,” not only authenticating the self but constructing the self from what was previously thin air (Wegner 2005). 

 As Jack & Robbins note, “a genuine illusion remains compelling even when the subject knows their experience is misleading.” (Anthony I. Jacka and Philip Robbins)..... each self must have been created sometime, somewhere, somehow. Short of imagining eternal souls, most of us recognize that there is a point in each human’s development that marks the development of self. We each undergo a transition from being an organism that behaves to being a person who acts; and it is in this transition that we begin to experience what our bodies do as flowing from the prior thoughts of an entity we call “I.” 

 the products of mental processes may be knowable, but the mental processes themselves are not “self-luminous,” .... The illusion of conscious will is the belief that we are intrinsically informed of how our minds cause our actions by the fact that we have an experience of the causation that occurs in our minds.

 If the experience of conscious will is indeed connected in any but the most capricious way to the causal sequence whereby actions occur, it should not be mostly right but sometimes wrong. It should be perfect. If the feeling of conscious will is intrinsically right, informed somehow by the fact that it is the cause of an action, it should lock on to that causal relationship and always reflect it correctly....This logic requires that we draw an important inference. From The feeling of conscious will can be mistaken,we must conclude that the feeling of conscious will is never correct. 

It is more parsimonious to assume that there is an action production system and an authorship processing system – one motor to make the actions, another to create the experience of willing them. The action production system does the marvelous things of which humans are capable; it causes behavior. The authorship processing system, meanwhile, rumbles alongside the main machine, taking in all the information that is relevant to determining which actions should be ascribed to the self and which occur because of outside events and other agents. Much of the time, the authorship processing system gets it right: Feelings of conscious will well up appropriately just as behaviors occur that are causally traceable to the person’s brain and mind. Such feelings ebb at other times when events happen that are truly not authored by the person’s brain and mind. However, this authorship processor is only loosely coupled to the action production system, a kind of observer of the system (cf. Gazzaniga 1988), so sometimes it can get things wrong. This kind of cognitive mechanism seems likely to be something that might reasonably have evolved to produce feelings of conscious will in the human. Theorists who insist that mistaken experiences of will and authentic experiences of will can coexist in the same organism would have us believe that instead of a self-knowing mechanism, the mind is a monstrous hybrid of robot and soul.

 Because having experiences of conscious will – whether they are correct or incorrect in any given instance – is a necessary step for assigning authorship to oneself, and so doing, fabricating the self, the experience is what creates the possibility of responsibility.... A person is constructed in the mind of the person, and, through a variety of communications and evidences, in the minds of others as well (cf. Dennett 1987).

 We can argue all day about what caused a given action, but this is simply not the same argument as whether the person is responsible

"Prayer and Support"  - a phrase that is intended to alleviate the pain and suffering of another person. It most effectively alleviates the pain and suffering of the one who is offering "prayer and support."(Mine)

America's Song

rat, tat, tat
   thud, thud, thud

crying and waling
   sobbing, and screaming
gnashing of teeth

There are the ribbons,
   and the flowers, purple, red, and white
balloons flop aimlessly on a stick
    pictures of smiling faces
cards, and candles and incense sticks
cotton candy and boxes of chocolates
and, of course, the flags waving in the wind,
always the waving flags.

Then there are the prayers
to whom? or what? where?
and the why's?
always, the why's?
the why's that are never answered.

and then the encores,
over again,
and again,
and again...

the song plays on
rat, tat, tat
  thud, thud, thud.

Behave - Robert M. Sapolsky

Finally, sometimes the only way to understand our humanness is to consider solely humans, because the things we do are unique. While a few other species have regular nonreproductive sex, we're the only ones to talk afterward about how it was. We construct cultures premised on beliefs concerning the nature of life and can transmit those beliefs multigenerationally, even between two individuals separated by millennia - just consider the perennial best seller, the Bible. Consonant with that, we can harm by doing things as unprecedented as and no more physically taxing than pulling a trigger, or nodding consent, or looking the other way. We can be passive-aggressive, damn with faint praise, cut with scorn, express contempt with patronizing concern. All species are unique, but we are unique in some pretty unique ways.

"The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference." Elie Wiesel.

This is a central point of this book - we don't hate violence. We hate and fear the wrong kind of violence, violence in the wrong context. Because violence in the right context is different....We build theologies around violence, elect leaders who excel at it, and in the case of so many women, preferentially mate with champions of human combat. When it's the "right" type of aggression, we love it.

Which reminds us that we don't hate aggression; we hate the wrong kind of aggression but love it in the right context.

the more neurons that a neuron projects to, the more neurons it can influence; however, the more neurons it projects to, the smaller its average influence will be at each of those target neurons.

Addiction - reoccurring brain activity resulting in a thought pattern that induces undesired behaviors and/or cravings. (mine) Addiction is clearly a complex disease that involves motivational and higher-order cognitive processes that initiate and control goal-directed behaviors, and accumulating evidence implicates altered glutamatergic neurotransmission mediated by projections to and from the prefrontal cortex in the neuroplasticity of addiction (Jentsch and Taylor, 1999; Kalivas, 2009). The PFC is highly integrated into the addiction neurocircuitry. Addictive behaviors, such as those associated with alcohol abuse and alcoholism, include loss of control over consumption and relapse to drinking. The PFC normally exerts “top-down” (e.g., information derived from prior experience) inhibitory control over internal and external sensory-driven compulsive behaviors. Increasing evidence suggests that continued drug exposure leads to attenuation of the ability of the PFC to monitor and inhibit these behaviors, with eventual loss of inhibitory control over drinking. Alcohol and the Prefrontal Cortex. The following are commonly considered to be addictive: heroin, cocaine, alcohol, opiates, nicotine, amphetamine, and their synthetic analogs. These drugs alter the neuromodulatory influence of dopamine on the processing of reinforcement signals by prolonging the action of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens or by stimulating the activation of neurons there and also in the VTA. The most common drugs of abuse stimulate the release of dopamine, which creates both their rewarding and the psychomotor effects. Compulsive drug-taking behaviors are a result of the permanent functional changes in the mesolimbic dopamine system arising from repetitive dopamine stimulation.

depolarization is a change within a cell, during which the cell undergoes a shift in electric charge distribution, resulting in less negative charge inside the cell. 
Hyperpolarization is a change in a cell's membrane potential that makes it more negative. It is the opposite of adepolarization. It inhibits action potentials by increasing the stimulus required to move the membrane potential to the action potential threshold.
BLA - Basolateral amygdala 

Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.

When we stop fearing something, it isn't because some amygdaloid neurons have lost their excitability. We don't passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn't anymore.

Fear and aggression are not inevitably intertwined - not all fear causes aggression, and not all aggression is rooted in fear. Fear typically increases aggression only those already prone to it; among the subordinate who lack the option of expressing aggression safely, fear does the opposite.

the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do.

self-discipline is good

Willpower is more than just a metaphor; self-control is a finite resource. Frontal neurons are expensive cells, and expensive cells are vulnerable cells. Consistent with that, the frontal cortex is atypically vulnerable to various neurological insults.

Pertinent to this is the concept of "cognitive load." Make the frontal cortex work hard - a tough working-memory task, regulating social behavior, or making numerous decisions while shopping. Immediately afterward performance on a different frontally dependent task declines.
automaticity - the ability to do things automatically without thinking about it. This occurs as repetitive tasks move from the frontal cortex to more reflexive parts of the brain such as the cerebellum.

But while emotion and cognition can be somewhat separable, they're rarely in opposition. Instead they are intertwined in a collaborative relationship needed for normal function, and as tasks with both emotive and cognitive components become more difficult (making an increasingly complex economic decision in a setting that is increasingly unfair), activity in the two structures becomes more synchronized. 
(vmPFC = ventromedial  prefrontal cortex, or emotional part of prefrontal cortex.
dlPFC = dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or deliberate part of prefrontal cortex.)  

Working memory is a form of sustained attention for the processing of prospective action. Thus, working memory involves the maintenance and manipulation of task-relevant information in the service of planning, problem solving, and predicting forthcoming events.

This is our world of habituation, where nothing is ever as good as that first time.
     Unfortunately, things have to work this way because of  our range of rewards. After all, reward coding must accommodate the rewarding properties of both solving a math problem and having an orgasm. Dopaminergic responses to reward, rather than being absolute, are relative to the reward value of alternative outcomes. In order to accommodate the pleasures of both mathematics and orgasms, the system must constantly rescale to accommodate the range of intensity offered by particular stimuli. The response to any reward must habituate with repetition, so that the system can respond over its full range to the next new thing. Thus, in typical mammals the dopamine system codes in a scale-free manner over a wide range of experience for both good and bad surprises and is constantly habituating to yesterday's news. But humans have something in addition, namely that we invent pleasures far more intense than anything offered by the natural world....Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than in stimulated in our old drug-free world.
     An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. First, we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consume more, we'd desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get.
     In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation.... In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the reward itself is almost an afterthought (unless, of course, the reward fails to arrive, in which case it's the most important thing in the world). If you know your appetite will be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating.
     ...Though the dopamine system is similar across numerous species, humans do something utterly novel: we delay gratification for insanely long times...: we use the dopaminergic power of the happiness of pursuit to motivate us to work for rewards that come after we are dead -depending on your culture, this can be knowing that your nation is closer to winning a war because you've sacrificed yourself in battle, that your kids will inherit money because of your financial sacrifices, or that you will spend eternity in paradise. It is extraordinary neural circuitry that bucks temporal discounting enough to allow (some of) us to care about the temperature of the planet that our great-grandchildren will inherit. Basically, it's unknown how we humans do this. We may merely be a type of animal, mammal, primate, and ape, but we're a profoundly unique one.

    While this neurobiology is mighty impressive, the brain is not where a behavior "begins." It's merely the final common pathway by which all the factors in the chapters to come converge and create behavior.

Self representation is fundamental to mental functions. While the self has mostly been studied in traditional psychophilosophical terms (‘self as subject’), recent laboratory work suggests that the self can be measured quantitatively by assessing biases towards self-associated stimuli (‘self as object’). Here, we summarize new quantitative paradigms for assessing the self, drawn from psychology, neuroeconomics, embodied cognition, and social neuroscience. We then propose a neural model of the self as an emerging property of interactions between a core ‘self network’ (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex; mPFC), a cognitive control network [e.g., dorsolateral (dl)PFC], and a salience network (e.g., insula). 

New paradigms have emerged from psychology, neuroeconomics, embodied cognition, and social neuroscience that provide objective measures of the self.

Neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies using these new paradigms have revealed central roles for three brain networks in self-processing: a core ‘self network’ (medial prefrontal regions), a cognitive control network (lateral PFC and superior temporal sulcus), and a salience network (insula, amygdala, and striatum).

Self-processing has also been gaining increased attention in neuropsychiatric research, because initial evidence suggests the self is altered in almost all psychiatric disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, and personality disorders.

The importance of bodily signals in selfhood has also been extensively examined in recent studies. This line of research emphasizes that sensory (e.g., proprioceptive) and physiological (e.g., heart rate) signals coming from the body are crucial for the conscious awareness of feelings and ‘self as object’ ....These studies suggest that the sense of the self largely depends on the spatial boundaries of the body; by experimentally manipulating bodily information, the perception of the self can also be altered.

People often form beliefs about themselves through the lens of others and interactions with others.

Based on the literature reviewed above, we propose a neural framework of the ‘self as object’, which considers the self as an emerging property of interactions between brain networks implementing the ‘core self’, cognitive control, and salience processing 

Self as Object

Forming memories doesn't require new synapses (let alone new branches or neurons); it requires the strengthening of preexisting synapses.

Memory is strengthening, or more tightly coupling. Translated into cellular terms, "strengthening" means that the wave of excitation in a dendritic spine spreads farther, getting closer to the distant axon hillock.

We've seen how in adults experience can alter the number of synapses and dendritic branches, remap circuitry, and stimulate neurogenesis. Collectively, these effects can be big enough to actually change the size of brain regions.

Hippocampal neurogensis is enhanced by learning, excercise, estrogen, antidepressants, environmental enrichment, and brain injury and inhibited by various stressors.

Thus, experience, health, and hormone fluctations can change the size of parts of the brain in a matter of months. Experience can also cause long-lasting changes in the number of receptors for neurotransmitters and hormones, in levels of ion channels, and in the state of on/off switches on genes in the brain.

With chronic stress the nucleus accumbens is depleted of dopamine, biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression...Basically, most anything you can measure in the nervous system can change in response to a sustained stimulus. And importantly, these changes are often reversible in a different environment.

This chapter's key fact is that the final brain region to fully mature (in terms of synapse number, myelination, and metabolism) is the frontal cortex, not going fully online until the mid/twenties.

But in reality the brain is about circuits, about the patterns of functional connectivity among regions. The growing myelination of the adolescent brain shows the importance of increased connectivity.

An oft-repeated fact about adolescents is how "emotional intelligence" and "social intelligence" predict adult success and happiness better than do IQ and SAT scores.

Adult life is filled with consequential forks in the road where the right thing is definitely harder. Navigating these successfully is the portfolio of the frontal cortex, and developing the ability to do this right in each context requires profound shaping by experience.

But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you.

Depression's defining symptom is anhedonia, the inability to feel, anticipate, or pursue pleasure. Chronic stress depletes the mesolimbic system of dopamine, generating anhedonia.

Depression is fundamentally a pathological sense of loss of control (explaining the classic description as "learned helplessness").

The link between exposure to childhood media violence and increased adult aggression is stronger than the link between lead exposure and IQ, calcium intake and bone mass, or asbestos and laryngreal cancer.

As we'll see, genes and fetal environment are relevant. But most important, recall the logic of collapsing different types of trauma into a single category. What counts is the sheer number of times a child is bludgeoned by life and the number of protective factors. Be sexually abused as a child, or witness violence, and your adult prognosis is better that if you had experienced both. Experience childhood poverty, and your future prospects are better if your family is stable and loving than broken and acrimonious. Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.

As emphasized by the psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, the opposite of play is not work - it's depression.

(a) each gene specifies the production of a specific type of protein; (b) a gene has be "activated" for the protein to be produced and "deactivated" to stop producing it - thus genes come with on/off switches; (c) every cell in our bodies contains the same library of genes; (d) during development, the pattern of which genes are activated determines which cells turn into nose, which into toes, and so on; (e) forever after, nose, toes, and other cells retain distinctive patterns of gene activation.

While little in childhood determines an adult behavior, virtually everything in childhood changes propensities toward some adult behavior. "childhood matter"

Similarly, it shouldn't require molecular genetics or neuroendocrinology factoids to prove that childhood matters and thus that is profoundly matters to provide childhoods filled with good health and safety, love and nurturance and opportunity.

Genes typically come in different versions: we each consist of an individuated orchestration of the different versions of our approximately twenty thousand genes.

In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you'll understand the big picture.

A gene is the basic physical and functional unit of heredity. Genes, which are made up of DNA, act as instructions to make molecules called proteins. In humans, genes vary in size from a few hundred DNA bases to more than 2 million bases. The Human Genome Project has estimated that humans have between 20,000 and 25,000 genes.

Every person has two copies of each gene, one inherited from each parent. Most genes are the same in all people, but a small number of genes (less than 1 percent of the total) are slightly different between people. Alleles are forms of the same gene with small differences in their sequence of DNA bases. These small differences contribute to each person’s unique physical features.

Genetics Home Reference

The entire stretch of nucleotides that codes for a single type of protein is called a gene. The entire collection of DNA is called the genome, coding for all of the tens of thousands of genes in an organism; "sequencing" the genome means determining the unique sequence of the billions of nucleotides that make up that organism's genome. That stretch of DNA is so long (containing roughly twenty thousand genes in humans) that it has to be broken into separate volumes, called chromosomes.

DNA determines RNA determines protein. And implicit is that central dogma is another critical point; one type of gene specifies one type of protein.

the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment. In other words, genes don't make sense outside the context of environment, both internal, and external. Thus not only does environment regulate genes, but it can do with effects that last days to lifetimes.

a. Genes are not autonomous agents commanding biological events.
b. Genes are regulated by the environment, consisting of everything from events inside the cell to the entire universe.
c. Much of DNA turns environmental influences into gene transcription; evolution is heavily about changing regulation of gene transcription, rather than about genes themselves.
d. Epigenetics can allow environmental effects to be lifelong, or even multigenerational.

heritability - gene tendency, the lower the heritability score the less like are genetics in explaining a behavior: it's not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment.

a. A gene's influence on the average value of a trait (i.e. whether it is inherited) differs from its influence on variability of that trait across individuals(its heritability).
d. Gene/environment interactions are ubiquitous and can be dramatic. Thus, you can't really say what a gene does, only what it does in the environment in which its been studied.

Heritability of various aspects of cognitive development is very high(e.g., around 70 percent for IQ) in kids from high socioeconomic status families but is only around 10 percent in low socioeconomic kids. Thus, higher socioeconomic allows the full range of genetic influences to flourish, whereas lower socioeconomic settings restrict them. In other words, genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you're growing up in awful poverty - poverty's adverse effects trump the genetics. Similarly, heritability of alcohol use is lower among religious than nonreligious subjects - i.e., your genes matter much if you're in a religious environment that condemns drinking.

Genes have plenty to do with behavior. Even more appropriately, all behavior traits are affected to some degree by genetic variability. They have to be, given, that they specify the structure of all the proteins pertinent to every neurotransmitter, hormone, receptor, etc. that there is. And they have plenty to do with individual differences in behavior, given the large percentage of genes that are polymorphic, coming in different flavors. But their effects are supremely context dependent. Ask not what a gene does. Ask what is does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes.

But consider a paper published in Science in 2008. The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in forty countries (based on economic, educational, and political indices of gender equality; the worst was Turkey, the United States was middling, and, naturally, the Scandinavians were tops). Lo and behold, the more gender equality the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries, it's statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender-equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys.
Culture leaves long-lasting residues - Shiites and Sunnis slaughter each other over a succession issue fourteen centuries old; across thirty-three countries population density in the year 1500 significantly predicts how authoritarian the government was in 2000; over the course of millennia, earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts gender equality today.
And in other, other, other words, when we contemplate our iconic acts - the pulling of a trigger, the touching of an arm - and want to explain why they happened using a biological framework, culture better be on our list of explanatory factors.

Inequality emerged when "stuff" - things to possess and accumulate - was invented following animal domestication and the development of agriculture. The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality. Moreover, inequality expands enormously when cultures invent inheritance within families. Once invented, inequality became pervasive. Among traditional pastoralist or small-scale agricultural societies, levels of wealth inequality match or exceed those in the most unequal industrialized societies.

Economic capital is the collective quantity of goods, services, and financial resources. Social capital is the collective quantity of resources such as trust, reciprocity, and cooperation....Put simply, cultures with more income inequality have less social capital. Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry. Moreover, a culture highly unequal in material resources is almost always also unequal in the ability to pull the strings of power, have efficacy, to be visible. (For example, as income inequality grows, the percentage of people who bother voting generally declines.)

But the more income inequality, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average and thus the less direct the wealthy feel from improving public goods. Instead they benefit more from  dodging taxes and spending  on their private good - a chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As Evans writes, "the more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be the disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have [available to them] to mount effective political opposition". Evans notes how this "secession of the wealthy" promotes "private affluence and public squalor."

Poverty is not a predictor of crime as much as poverty among plenty is. For example, extent of income inequality is a major predictor of rates of violent crime across American states and across industrialized nations.
Why does income inequality lead to more crime? Again, there's the psychosocial angle - inequality means less social capital, less trust, cooperation, and people watching out for one another. And there's the neomaterialist angle - inequality means more secession of the wealthy from contributing to the public good. Kaplan has shown, for example, that states with more income inequality spend proportionately less money on that key crime-fighting tool, education. As with inequality and health, the psychosocial and neomaterial routes synergize.

As documented by Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia, it is only when societies grow large enough that people regularly encounter strangers that "Big Gods" emerge - deities who are concerned with human morality and punish our transgressions.

(a) a religion reflects the values of the culture that invented or adopted it, and very effectively transmits those values; (b) religion fosters the best and worst of our behaviors.

Another key theme is the paradoxical influence of ecology. Ecosystems majorly shape culture - but then that culture can be exported and persist in radically different places for millennia. Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth's humans have inherited their belief systems about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.

"Nothing in biology makes except in the light of evolution." Theodosius Dobzhansky

Evolution rests on three steps: (a) certain biological traits are inherited by genetic means; (b) mutations and gene recombination produce variation in those traits; (c) some of those variants confer more "fitness" than others. Given those conditions, over time the frequency of more "fit" gene variants increases in a population.

misconceptions: (1) evolution favors survival of the fittest. Instead evolution is about reproduction, passing on copies of genes; (2) evolution can select for preadaptations - neutral traits that prove useful in the future. This doesn't happen; selection is for traits pertinent to the present. Related to this is the misconception that living species are somehow better adapted than extinct species. Instead, the latter were just as well adapted, until environmental conditions changed sufficiently to do them in; the same awaits us. (3) evolution directionally selects for greater complexity. Yes, if once there were only single-celled organisms and there are multicellular ones now, average complexity has increased. Nonetheless, evolution doesn't necessarily select for greater complexity - just consider bacteria decimating humans with some plague. (4) evolution is just a "theory."

Evolution sculpts two broad ways. "Sexual selection" selects for traits that attract members of the opposite sex, "natural selection" for traits that enhance the passing on of copies of genes through any other route - e.g., good health, foraging skills, predator avoidance.

First misconception, we are not descended from chimps. Or from any extant animal. We and chimps share a common ancestor from roughly five million years ago (and genomics show that chimps have been as busy evolving since then as we have.)
Measure after measure, it's the same. We aren't classically monogamous or polygamous. As everyone from poets to divorce attorneys can attest, we are by nature profoundly confused - mildly polygamous, floating somewhere in between.

"There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the wold into two kinds of people and those who don't." Robert Benchley.

What helps define a particular culture? Values, beliefs, attributions, ideologies. All invisible, until they are yoked with arbitrary markers such as dress, ornamentation, or regional accent.

Thus, the strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by: (a) the speed and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group differences; (b) the unconscious automaticity of such processes; (c) its presence in other primates and very young humans; and (d) the tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and to then imbue those markers with power.

So in-group parochialism is often more concerned about Us beating Them than with Us simply doing well. This is the essence of tolerating inequality in the name of loyalty. Consistent with that, priming loyalty strengthens in-group favoritism and identification, while priming equality does the opposite.
Most common is forgiving Us more readily than Them. As we will see, this is often rationalized - we screw up because of special circumstances; They screw up because that's how They are.

But Us-ness based on sacred values, with whole bigger than sums of parts, where unenforceable obligations stretch across generations, millennia, even into afterlives, where it's Us, right of wrong, is the essence of faith-based relationships.

The nature of group membership can be bloodily contentious concerning people's relationship to the state. Is it contractual? The people pay taxes, obey laws, serve in the army; the government provides social services, builds roads, and helps after hurricanes. Or is it one of sacred values? The people give absolute obedience and the state provides the myths of the Fatherland. Few such citizens can conceive that if the stork had arbitrarily deposited them elsewhere, they'd fervently feel the innate rightness of a different brand of exceptionalism, goose-stepping to different martial music.

"Disgust serves as an ethnic or out-group marker." Paul Rozin

Essentialism is all about viewing Them as homogeneous and interchangeable, the idea that while we are individuals, they have a monolithic, immutable, icky essence.

"The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual." Reinhold Niebuhr

"race" is a biological continuum rather than a discrete category - for example, unless you cherry-pick the date, genetic variation within race is generally as great as between races.
Furthermore, the notion of race as a fixed, biologically based classification system doesn't work either. At various times in the history of the U.S. census, "Mexican" and "Armenian" were classified as distinctive races; southern Italians were of a different race from northern Europeans; someone with one black great-grandparent and seven white ones was a white in Oregon but not Florida. This is race as a cultural rather than biological construct.

Like other hierarchical species, we have alpha individuals, but unlike most others, we occasionally get to chose them. Moreover, they often are not merely highest ranking but also "lead," attempting to maximize this thing called the common good.Furthermore, individuals vie for leadership with differing visions of how best to attain that common good - political ideologies. And finally, we express obedience both to an authority and to the idea of Authority.

hierarchy = is a ranking system that formalizes unequal access to limited resources, ranging from meat to that nebulous thing called "prestige."

The Socioeconomic /health gradient is ubiquitous. Regardless of gender, age, or race. With or without universal health care. In societies that are ethnically homogeneous and those rife with ethnic tensions. In societies in which the central mythology is a capitalist credo of  "Living well is the best revenge" and those in which it is a socialist anthem of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.

politics = the struggle among the powerful with differing visions of the common good.

It also gives insight into a puzzling feature of the political landscape: how is it that over the last fifty years, Republicans have persuaded impoverished white Americans to so often vote against their own economic self-interest? Do they actually believe that they're going to win the lottery and then get to enjoy the privileged side of American inequality? Nah. The psychological issues of needing structured familiarity show that for poor whites, voting Republicans constitutes an implicit act of system justification and risk aversion. Better to resist change and deal with the devil that you know....
Related to this is "terror-management theory," which suggests that conservatism is psychologically rooted in pronounced fear of death; supporting this is the finding that priming people to think about their mortality makes them more conservative.
These differences in threat perception help explain the differing views as to role of government - providing for people (the leftist view; social services, education, etc.) or protecting people (the rightest view; law and order, the military, etc.).
Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality - it must be a drag being right-wing. But, despite that, in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists. Why? Perhaps it's having simpler answers, unburdened by motivation correction. Or, as favored by the authors, because system justification allows conservatives to rationalize and be less discomfited by inequality. And as economic inequality rises, the happiness gap between the Right and Left increases.

insular cortex - mediates gustatory and olfactory disgust, and moral disgust in humans.

As we saw, make a liberal more tired, hungry, rushed, distracted, disgusted, and they become more conservative. Make a conservative more detached about something viscerally disturbing, and they become more liberal.
Thus political orientation about social issues reflects sensitivity so visceral disgust and strategies for coping with such disgust.

Liberalism has been associated with larger amounts of gray matter in the cingulate cortex (with its involvement in empathy), whereas conservatism has been associated with an enlarged amygdala (with, of course, its starring role in threat perception).

social identity theory - the concept of who we are is heavily shaped social context. Being different = Being wrong.

"the issue isn't how a few bad apples can ruin the whole barrel; it's how a bad barrel can turn any apple bad." Zimbardo. rather than concentrating on one evil person at a time (medical approach), one must understand how some environments cause cause epidemics of evil. (public health approach). "Any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do - given the same situational forces."

"The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago.

Humans committed themselves to a unique trajectory when we invented socioeconomic status. In terms of its caustic, scarring impact on minds and bodies, nothing in the history of animals being crappy to one another about status differences comes within light-years of our invention of poverty.

We're really out there as a species in that sometimes our high-status individuals don't merely plunder and instead actually lead, actually attempt to facilitate the common good. We've even developed bottom-up mechanisms for collectively choosing such leaders on occasion. A magnificent achievement. Which we then soil by having our choosing of leaders be shaped by implicit, automatic factors more suitable to five-year-olds deciding who should captain their boat on a voyage with the Teletubbies to Candyland.

If you really want to understand someone's politics, understand their cognitive load, how prone they are to snap judgments, their approaches to reappraisal and resolving cognitive dissonance. Even more importantly, understand how they feel about novelty, ambiguity, empathy, hygiene disease and dis-ease, and whether things used to be better and the future is a scary place.

Finally, the pull of conformity and obedience can lead us to some of our darkest, most appalling places, and far more of us can be led there than we'd like to think. But despite that, even the worst of barrels don't turn all apples bad, and "Resistance" and Heroism" are often more accessible and less rarefied and capitalized than assumed. We're rarely alone in thinking this wrong, wrong, wrong. And we are usually no less special or unique than those before us who have fought back.

morality is not only belief in norms of appropriate behaviors but also the belief that they should be shared and transmitted culturally.

But at their core, market interactions represent an impoverishment of human reciprocity.

Shame is external judgement by the group, while guilt is internal judgment of yourself. Shame is about honor. Guilt is about conscience. Shame requires an audience, Guilt is private.

Bizarrely, the American legal system considers a corporation to be an individual in many ways, one that is psychopathic in the sense of having no conscience and being solely interested in profits. The people running corporations are occasionally criminally responsible; however, they are not morally responsible.

"Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness." Greene

our moral intuitions are neither primordial nor reflexively primitive. They are the end products of learning; they are cognitive conclusions to which we have been exposed so often that they have become automatic, as implicit as riding a bicycle or reciting the days of the week forward rather than backward.... Our guts learn their intuitions.

"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike." Oscar Wilde

most intergroup conflicts ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose "right" is better.

In general, our morally tinged cultural institutions - religion, nationalism, ethnic pride, team spirit - bias us toward our best behaviors when we are single shepherds facing a potential tragedy of the commons. They make us less selfish in Me versus Us situations. But they send us hurtling toward our worst behaviors when confronting Thems and their different moralities.
Resisting temptation is as implicit as walking up stairs...; it's what moral imperatives have been hammered into you with such urgency and consistency that doing the right thing has virtually become a spinal reflex.
This is not to suggest that honesty, even impeccable honesty that resists all temptation, can only be the outcome of implicit automaticity. We can think and struggle and employ cognitive control to produce similar stainless records, as shown in some subsequent work. But in circumstances like the Greene and Paxton study, with repeated opportunities to cheat in rapid succession, it's not going to a case of successfully arm wrestling the devil over and over. Instead, automaticity is required.

sympathy - means you feel sorry for someone else's pain without understanding it.
empathy - means you understand someone's pain, taking their perspective, walking in their shoes.
compassion - your resonance with someone else's pain leads you to actually help.

Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the average, the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act. Moreover, wealthier people are less adept at recognizing other people's emotions and in experimental settings are greedier and more likely to cheat or steal.... wealthier people are more likely to endorse greed as being good, to view the class system as fair and meritocratic, and to view their success as an act of independence.

"If I look at the mass, I will never act." - Mother Teresa
"The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic." Joseph Stalin

When it comes to empathic states, "emotion" and "cognition" are totally false dichotomies; you need both, but with the balance between the two shifting on a continuum, and the cognition end of it has to do the heavy lifting when the differences between you and the person in pain initially swap the similarities.

[Empathy] can also offer a dangerous sense of completion: that something has been done because something has been felt. It is tempting to think that feeling someone's pain is necessarily virtuous in its own right. The peril of empathy isn't simply that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good, which in turn encourage us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than part of a process, a catalyst.  Leslie Jamison.

empathy training - focus on feeling the pain of someone else in distress.
compassion training - focus on feeling warmth and care for another person in distress.

exaptation - a trait that evolves for one purpose and is co-opted for something else.

Sacred values are defended far out of proportion to their material or instrumental importance or likelihood of success, because to any group such values define "who we are."

but peace is not the mere absence of war, and making true peace requires acknowledging and respecting the sacred values of Them.

compatibilism - we have something resembling a spirit, a soul, an essence that embodies our free will, from which emanates behavioral intent; and that this spirit coexists with biology that can sometimes constrain it...It's encapsulated in the idea that well-intentioned spirit, while willing, can be thwarted by flesh that is sufficiently weak.

mitigated free will - people need to be held responsible for their actions, but there can be mitigating circumstances. It is the idea that there can be "diminished" responsibility for our actions, that something can be semivoluntary.

things that affect the execution of free will: brain specific transcription factors, neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogensis. Aspects of brain funtion can be influenced by someone's prenatal environment, genes and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast, etc.

homunculus - a very small human or humanoid creature.

Essentially everyone working with a model of mitigated free will accepts that if there is enough brain damage, responsibility for a criminal act goes out the window.

..."our social world is ultimately as much a product of our determined, materialist brains as are our simple motor movements."

causation verses compulsion - causation suggests every behavior is caused by something. compulsion suggests there is a subset of behaviors that compromises rational, deliberative processes. In this view some behaviors are seen as more deterministically biological than others.

readiness potential - a signal from the motor cortex and supplementary premotor areas that a movement would soon be initiated... readiness potentials appear about half a second before the reported time of conscious intent to move.

Of all the stances of mitigated free will, the one that assigns aptitude to biology and effort to free will, or impulse to biology and resisting it to free will, is the most permeating and destructive. "You must have worked so hard" is as much a property of the physical universe and biology that emerged from it as is "You must be so smart."

"Brains don't kill people. People kill people."

It seems like something has to give, either our commitment to free will or our commitment to the idea that every event is completely caused by the preceding events." Shaun Nichols

we still can't predict much about behavior. Perhaps at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to individuals. The biology of the behaviors that interest us is, in all cases, multifactorial.... Not different amounts of biological causation; different types of causation.

People intuitively believe in free will, not just because we have this incredible human need for agency but also because most people know next to nothing about those internal forces.

"We argue that neuroscience will probably have a transformative effect on the law, despite the fact that existing legal doctrine can, in principle, accommodate whatever neuroscience will tell us. New neuroscience will change the law, not by undermining its current assumptions, but by transforming people's moral intuitions about free will and responsibility."

"Free will, it is often said, requires the ability do otherwise"

For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything. 


Punishment is effortful and costly, ranging from forgoing a reward when rejecting a lowball offer in the Ultimatum Game to our tax dollars paying for the dental plan of the prison guard who operates the lethal injection machine. That rush of self-righteous pleasure is what drives us to shoulder the costs. Sure, as I said, punishment would still be used in an instrumental fashion, to acutely shape behavior. But there is simply no place for the idea that punishment is a virtue. 

I can't really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we'll have to settle for make sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters - when we judge others harshly.

"we speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them"  David Hume

"It must be stressed that the contrast of intuition and reasoning is not the contrast of emotion and cognition. Intuition, reasoning, and the appraisals contained in emotions (Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1991) are all forms of cognition. Rather, the words intuition and reasoning are intended to capture the contrast made by dozens of philosophers and psychologists between two kinds of cognition. The most important distinctions (see Table 1) are that intuition occurs quickly, effortlessly, and automatically, such that the outcome but not the process is accessible to consciousness, whereas reasoning occurs more slowly, requires some effort, and involves at least some steps that are accessible to consciousness." Jonathan Haidt

"moral discussions and arguments are notorious for the rarity with which persuasion takes place. Because moral positions always have an affective component to them, it is hypothesized that reasoned persuasion works not by providing logically compelling arguments but by triggering new affectively valenced intuitions in the listener" Jonathan Haidt

"It is hypothesized that people rarely override their initial intuitive judgments just by reasoning privately to themselves because reasoning is rarely used to question one's own attitudes or beliefs."

 defense motivation, "the desire to hold attitudes and beliefs that are congruent with existing self-definitional attitudes and beliefs"

This review is not intended to imply that people are stupid or irrational. It is intended to demonstrate that the roots of human intelligence, rationality, and ethical sophistication should not be sought in our ability to search for and evaluate evidence in an open and unbiased way. Rather than following the ancient Greeks in worshiping reason, we should instead look for the roots of human intelligence, rationality, and virtue in what the mind does best: perception, intuition, and other mental operations that are quick, effortless, and generally quite accurate

 post hoc constructions. When asked to explain their behaviors, people engage in an effortful search that may feel like a kind of introspection. However, what people are searching for is not a memory of the actual cognitive processes that caused their behaviors, because these processes are not accessible to consciousness. Rather, people are searching for plausible theories about why they might have done what they did. People turn first to a "pool of culturally supplied explanations for behavior," which Nisbett and Wilson (1977) refer to as "a priori causal theories" 
A priori moral theories can be defined as a pool of culturally supplied norms for evaluating and criticizing the behavior of others. A priori moral theories provide acceptable reasons for praise and blame

Even though people in all cultures have more or less the same bodies, they have different embodiments, and therefore they end up with different minds.


J Haidt
The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail   Jonathan Haidt

The anxiety-reducing effects of belief are logical, given that psychological stress is about lack of control, predictability, outlets, and social support. Depending on the religion, belief brings an explanation for why things happen, a conviction that there is a purpose, and the sense of a creator who is interested in us, who is benevolent, who responds to human entreaties, who preferentially responds to entreaties from people like you.

It's not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it's being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochical identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds.

shared goals reprioritizes Us/Them dichotomies.

"I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him."   Booker T Washington

Despite the claims of some economists, we are not rational optimization machines.

Biologically, intense love and intense hate aren't opposites. The opposite of each is indifference.

We implicitly divide the world into Us and Them, and prefer the former. We are easily manipulated, even subliminally and within seconds, as to who counts as each.

When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing that hierarchical primates had even seen before.

"Me" versus "Us" (being prosocial within your group) is easier than "us" versus "them" (prosociality between groups).

The road to hell is paved with rationalization.

Neither the capacity for fancy, rarefied moral reasoning nor for feeling great sympathy necessarily translates into actually doing something difficult, brave, and compassionate.

People kill and willing to be killed for symbolic sacred values. Negotiations can make peace with Them; understanding and respecting the intensity of their sacred values can make lasting peace.

Our worst behaviors, ones we condemn and punish, are the products of our biology. But don't forget that the same applies to our best behaviors. .

Religion, Brain and Behavior Journal