I just bought new batteries for my handy portable tape recorder. You may notice that the writing style of this post is a little different than my usual; that's because I dictated, then transcribed it.
One of the most important realizations that I've come to in the course of thinking about human beings, human behavior and human relationships is an idea that came to me suddenly while I was reading Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind: that is, the realization that relationships are not things.
Relationships have no discrete identity; talking about a relationship is not talking about a thing that actually exists. When people conceptualize relationships they conceptualize them as things, but what they actually are is repeated patterns of human behavior: some combination of human needs and human reactions to those needs, between two or more people, that result in a self-reproducing cycle of action.
One of the most important decisions I've ever made -- and I made it pretty recently -- was to stop trying to define relationships and instead to use language only to describe them. That means I've come to accept that calling something a relationship - calling someone a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, or a husband or a wife - has no substantial effect on the nature of what's between you and them.
You could argue this point, and if you did you'd be looking at the question in a more traditional way; to some extent, your objection would be valid. Naming something has an effect (and it's a meaningful effect) but naming a relationship doesn't have an effect on many of the most fundamental principles and forces that create relationships. When I say this I'm talking about affection, and talking about attraction; I'm talking about love*. These are things that cannot be willed into existence, things that have to happen as a reaction to the behavior and (to a lesser extent) the looks of another person.
When two people say things like, "Let's be in a relationship -- do you want to be my girlfriend? -- do you want to go steady?" what they really mean is "Let's execute a plan:" a plan that's often poorly understood and profoundly flawed. This is the plan that they've internalized as "How to make a relationship work."
Typically this plan has to do with commitment. Commitment is a beautiful thing if what you're looking for is a partnership, but the fuel of relationships is emotion and commitment is not an emotion. The same can be said of communication -- an incredible tool to facilitate living with someone in close quarters or negotiating contracts. Unfortunately, contracts do not make girls wet; contracts do not make boys hard. That's not to say that relationships are exclusively about sex, because they're not; more to the point, sex isn't exclusively about sex.
There are people out there who get very, very upset if you suggest that relationships are not about commitment and communication, and a lot of that has to do with fear. From a very young age we are fed a false dichotomy; we are taught that we must accept that realtionships are either built on intimacy, communication and commitment or that relationships are entirely random. Coming from this perspective, it's easy to understand why people might be uncomfortable with the idea that relationships aren't just something you decide to do. What it ignores is the idea that other people might be able to predictably influence our emotions -- that a balance of passion might be something that can be created deliberately in a relationship, might hinge on a set of skills which can be learned.
We are taught that deliberately influencing other peoples' emotional reactions is manipulation, and manipulation is evil. What I'd like to suggest in counterpoint is that putting someone in a position where they want to be with you, where they are powerfully attracted to you and fascinated by you, is one of the most powerful gifts that you can give them. This idea - inspired passion as a thing of value - leads me to say this:
The conventional view would have us believe that the principle of exchange at work in a relationship is commitment for commitment, but the reality of human behavior suggests that the real principle at work is commitment for passion. In exchange for the passion your partner inspires in you, you offer them your continued commitment -- and they do likewise.
Fair's fair.
*Footnote: "affection, attraction, and love" are the obvious/conventional fill-in-the-blank words in this context. My actual ideas about the emotions involved are sort of unconventional, but that's fodder for another post on another day.
Showing posts with label essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essays. Show all posts
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Evo-Bio and Sloppy Thinking, Part II
In Evo-Bio and Sloppy Thinking Part I, I introduced the ideas of Effective and Final Cause, and how they might be important to social theorists. This post won't make much sense if you don't read that one first. If you've read that post already, you should remember the limits I placed on where each type of causation applies:
*Effective Cause exists in all physical systems.
*Final Cause exists in those systems, such as evolution and human behavior, in which infinite possibilities exist but only a small subset of these possibilities are viable.
Since the mission statement of this essay is to help readers think clearly and detect unclear thinking, I should pause here and note that what I wrote above about Final Cause contains sloppy thinking. If you want to work your analytical muscles by figuring out the source of the sloppiness, you should stop now to reflect before I move on.
If you pinpointed my use of the word "viable" as the source of the sloppy thinking in my statement, then you and I are on the same page. Unless I declare a context for it explicitly, "viable" is all but meaningless. Because this is an essay about sociobiology, and evo-bio is something most of you have pre-existing ideas about, I can guess that you probably treated "viable" as meaning "increasing an individual's chances to survive and reproduce," but as a reader evaluating the coherence of my ideas, it's useful for you to be aware that you're making that assumption.
As a writer, I could (and normally would) use that implication as a bookmark in your understanding. Later, I could come back to it and say "When I used the word viable, I meant XY." If there was any doubt that your understanding of the term "viable" was the same as my intended meaning when I used it, though, a failure to clarify what I meant would be criminally sloppy on my part and you would be right to point that out.
If I'm trying to sell you an idea, it's in your best interests to know if it's based on clean or sloppy thinking.
Further, lest you be tempted to assume that all of this is irrelevant hair-splitting: "increasing an individual's chances to survive and reproduce" will NOT be my intended meaning for every use of the word "viable". In later installments of this essay I'll talk about the interaction of different units of viability and their effects on human behavior; examples of this include the interaction of evolution and human behavior, or human behavior and human institutions such as marriage. At this point, this essay almost - almost! - has a sound enough conceptual framework established that we can reasonably start to discuss the guts of human action from that kind of perspective. All that remains is to establish more clearly exactly what I mean when I say "Final Cause Systems."
These are systems in which changes create a result that either is or is not viable; the existence of viability in the context of a Final Cause system seems to give its results a purpose and the context itself seems to give it rules. In fact, any Final Cause System is probably easiest to understand if you think of it as being like a game, the rules of which are a natural consequence of what it means to be "viable" in a specific context. In the interests of clearly demonstrating how such "games" work, I'll start with evolution:
In the game of evolution, the player is a single copy of the human genome. The player is not the organism, and it is not the species. Because your genes don't change appreciably over the course of your life, and a new genome is created only when you reproduce, each round of the game lasts a single generation. A genome "wins" if it contains instructions for the growth of an organism that A) survives long enough to reproduce, B) successfully reproduces, and C) when it reproduces, creates a new genome which is likely to win the next round of the game.
The game of evolution is played exclusively in the planning stages. The only "moves" allowed are changes to the genome itself before the round begins, and there are only two methods by which these changes can be made:
1. Random Mutation
2. Sexual Reproduction (as contrasted with asexual reproduction)
The second option, sexual reproduction, is actually just a strategy developed in a previous round of the game. It "won" by increasing genetic variation (in game terms, the number of possible moves). Sexual reproduction operates by pooling half of the moves that created one player with half of the moves that created the other; no new moves can be created in this way. It's also worth noting that without the development of strategies that result in good sexual selection, sexual reproduction is as likely to result in the acquisition of bad strategies as good.
The only source of innovation in evolution is mutation.
The playing field of the game is set up as follows: an organism, constructed according to the specifications of the genome, is released into some environment. If it produces a new winning genome, the round is won. The environment the organism is released into is subject to variation whose type tends to be predictable within limits, while its degree and timing is unpredictable.
In case that's not clear I'll provide some examples:
*Types of Change (Predictable): Availability of food resources can vary drastically. Composition of the atmosphere (Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide etc.) tends not to vary greatly between generations.
*Degree and Timing of Change (Unpredictable): Variation in available food resources can happen to any degree at any time: a particularly good year can result in abundant vegetation (small change), or the decimation of a competing species by disease can lead to exclusive access to a food supply (large change).
For the most part, however, the environment of each round tends to resemble the environment used for the round before it. Because the genome is static throughout a single round of the game of evolution, a "winning" genome is one which codes for the construction of an organism primed to deal appropriately with the variation it encounters, and this is where genetics meet behavior.
Evo-Bio and Sloppy Thinking III will focus on the way that evolution and behavior interact in human beings; because these are both Final Cause Systems (and because I'll later develop other Final Cause Systems), I'll wrap with a shorthand notation that ought to be useful in comparing and contrasting the two. This is what I'll be using, from here out:
System: A label for the Final Cause system in question.
Viability: The "win condition" of the Final Cause System in question; the purpose of changes or actions governed by it.
Medium: The context in which the Final Cause System occurs.
Method: The form taken by changes or actions in the Final Cause System.
Input: The beginning elements of the "Final Cause" game.
Output: The ending elements of the "Final Cause" game.
For Evolution, this would be:
System: Evolution
Viability: production of new viable genome by genome-coded organism
Medium: genome (DNA)
Method: Mutation, sexual reproduction
Input: genome-coded organism + predictably variable environment
Output: viable new genome(s), OR non-viable new genome(s), OR nothing at all
*Effective Cause exists in all physical systems.
*Final Cause exists in those systems, such as evolution and human behavior, in which infinite possibilities exist but only a small subset of these possibilities are viable.
Since the mission statement of this essay is to help readers think clearly and detect unclear thinking, I should pause here and note that what I wrote above about Final Cause contains sloppy thinking. If you want to work your analytical muscles by figuring out the source of the sloppiness, you should stop now to reflect before I move on.
If you pinpointed my use of the word "viable" as the source of the sloppy thinking in my statement, then you and I are on the same page. Unless I declare a context for it explicitly, "viable" is all but meaningless. Because this is an essay about sociobiology, and evo-bio is something most of you have pre-existing ideas about, I can guess that you probably treated "viable" as meaning "increasing an individual's chances to survive and reproduce," but as a reader evaluating the coherence of my ideas, it's useful for you to be aware that you're making that assumption.
As a writer, I could (and normally would) use that implication as a bookmark in your understanding. Later, I could come back to it and say "When I used the word viable, I meant XY." If there was any doubt that your understanding of the term "viable" was the same as my intended meaning when I used it, though, a failure to clarify what I meant would be criminally sloppy on my part and you would be right to point that out.
If I'm trying to sell you an idea, it's in your best interests to know if it's based on clean or sloppy thinking.
Further, lest you be tempted to assume that all of this is irrelevant hair-splitting: "increasing an individual's chances to survive and reproduce" will NOT be my intended meaning for every use of the word "viable". In later installments of this essay I'll talk about the interaction of different units of viability and their effects on human behavior; examples of this include the interaction of evolution and human behavior, or human behavior and human institutions such as marriage. At this point, this essay almost - almost! - has a sound enough conceptual framework established that we can reasonably start to discuss the guts of human action from that kind of perspective. All that remains is to establish more clearly exactly what I mean when I say "Final Cause Systems."
These are systems in which changes create a result that either is or is not viable; the existence of viability in the context of a Final Cause system seems to give its results a purpose and the context itself seems to give it rules. In fact, any Final Cause System is probably easiest to understand if you think of it as being like a game, the rules of which are a natural consequence of what it means to be "viable" in a specific context. In the interests of clearly demonstrating how such "games" work, I'll start with evolution:
In the game of evolution, the player is a single copy of the human genome. The player is not the organism, and it is not the species. Because your genes don't change appreciably over the course of your life, and a new genome is created only when you reproduce, each round of the game lasts a single generation. A genome "wins" if it contains instructions for the growth of an organism that A) survives long enough to reproduce, B) successfully reproduces, and C) when it reproduces, creates a new genome which is likely to win the next round of the game.
The game of evolution is played exclusively in the planning stages. The only "moves" allowed are changes to the genome itself before the round begins, and there are only two methods by which these changes can be made:
1. Random Mutation
2. Sexual Reproduction (as contrasted with asexual reproduction)
The second option, sexual reproduction, is actually just a strategy developed in a previous round of the game. It "won" by increasing genetic variation (in game terms, the number of possible moves). Sexual reproduction operates by pooling half of the moves that created one player with half of the moves that created the other; no new moves can be created in this way. It's also worth noting that without the development of strategies that result in good sexual selection, sexual reproduction is as likely to result in the acquisition of bad strategies as good.
The only source of innovation in evolution is mutation.
The playing field of the game is set up as follows: an organism, constructed according to the specifications of the genome, is released into some environment. If it produces a new winning genome, the round is won. The environment the organism is released into is subject to variation whose type tends to be predictable within limits, while its degree and timing is unpredictable.
In case that's not clear I'll provide some examples:
*Types of Change (Predictable): Availability of food resources can vary drastically. Composition of the atmosphere (Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide etc.) tends not to vary greatly between generations.
*Degree and Timing of Change (Unpredictable): Variation in available food resources can happen to any degree at any time: a particularly good year can result in abundant vegetation (small change), or the decimation of a competing species by disease can lead to exclusive access to a food supply (large change).
For the most part, however, the environment of each round tends to resemble the environment used for the round before it. Because the genome is static throughout a single round of the game of evolution, a "winning" genome is one which codes for the construction of an organism primed to deal appropriately with the variation it encounters, and this is where genetics meet behavior.
Evo-Bio and Sloppy Thinking III will focus on the way that evolution and behavior interact in human beings; because these are both Final Cause Systems (and because I'll later develop other Final Cause Systems), I'll wrap with a shorthand notation that ought to be useful in comparing and contrasting the two. This is what I'll be using, from here out:
System: A label for the Final Cause system in question.
Viability: The "win condition" of the Final Cause System in question; the purpose of changes or actions governed by it.
Medium: The context in which the Final Cause System occurs.
Method: The form taken by changes or actions in the Final Cause System.
Input: The beginning elements of the "Final Cause" game.
Output: The ending elements of the "Final Cause" game.
For Evolution, this would be:
System: Evolution
Viability: production of new viable genome by genome-coded organism
Medium: genome (DNA)
Method: Mutation, sexual reproduction
Input: genome-coded organism + predictably variable environment
Output: viable new genome(s), OR non-viable new genome(s), OR nothing at all
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Evo-Bio and Sloppy Thinking, Part I
This post is intended to help guys (or girls!) interested in social dynamics to think clearly and cleanly about the "why"s of human behavior. In particular, I think folks who put themselves in a teaching or "dating guru" position have a responsibility to at least be aware of whether the things they teach are logically sound, because there's a lot of very sloppy thinking flying around. These bad mental habits reach their apex in discussions of sociobiology and evolutionary psych.
Before we start I have some questions that I'd like you, the reader, to ask yourself. The function of this post is not to accuse, and these questions aren't meant to be asked between you and me. They're meant to be asked between you and yourself.
*Is your thinking about cause and effect in human behavior clean, or sloppy?
*Is your understanding of why people do the things they do logical and coherent?
*Are you capable of detecting logical inconsistencies and incoherence in things you read and hear?
Okay. Now, assuming you've answered those questions for yourself, and before reading the rest of this post, identify the sloppy thinking in the following explanation of human behavior as it's commonly used by dating gurus:
"Women cheat because it increases the genetic diversity of their offspring, which has evolutionary value."
Please stop reading until you've thought about this.
Now, before I continue - assuming you've come to your conclusions - a few more points:
*This proposition about women and cheating is not actually invalid. It has merit. It's only criminally sloppy in the context in which it's being used.
*If your answer concerns the use of the word "cheat" and the question of whether it's appropriate to frame this behavior as cheating, there's better than even odds you have good mental hygiene. Questioning the subtext of word choice is a useful habit of thought, but isn't what this post aims to address.
The actual root of the sloppy thinking at work here is the seemingly innocent word "because." The reason "because" is problematic is that sociobio (or evo-psych, take your pick) must account for two types of causation in order to explain any human behavior. "Because," on its own, doesn't specify which type of cause it refers to - and this seems to be the source of a great deal of confusion.
In the interests of developing a useful vocabulary for use in explaining the difference between the two, I'm going to crib a couple of terms from Aristotle. He described four kinds of causation; I only need to borrow two.
EFFECTIVE CAUSE is the direct, typically physical cause of an event. If I push a book off of a table, the force exerted by my hand is the effective cause of it falling to the floor.
In contrast, FINAL CAUSE describes causation in terms of purpose. I may own a hammer because I need to drive nails (Final Cause!) but that doesn't mean that the moment I developed a need to drive nails I immediately had a hammer as a result.
Effective Causes are a part of any physical system. Without effective cause nothing would happen.
Final Causes exist in those systems, such as (learned) human behavior and (genetic) evolution, in which an infinite set of possibilities exist but only a very small subset of these are viable.
In case that's not clear, some examples should help:
*FINAL CAUSE: You start up your car so you can drive to the supermarket.
*EFFECTIVE CAUSE: Your car starts because you turned the key in the ignition.
*FINAL CAUSE: You burn a flag because it represents something you object to.
*EFFECTIVE CAUSE: A flag burns because you apply flame to it.
This becomes crucial to the understanding of social dynamics when it comes time to distinguish between the purpose of a behavior and the mechanism by which it is activated, like so:
*FINAL CAUSE: You eat because that way you can survive long enough to reproduce.
*EFFECTIVE CAUSE: You eat because you're hungry.
If your appetite failed and you went to your doctor, he would not concern himself with the overall reproductive value of your eating or not eating. He would concern himself with the mechanism of your appetite.
For the same reason, social theorists should concern themselves first with the mechanisms that drive behavior and only afterwards with the reasons those mechanisms have evolved. Not only are the two distinct, but one is actually more useful than the other.
Worst of all, of course, is to fail to distinguish at all.
Before we start I have some questions that I'd like you, the reader, to ask yourself. The function of this post is not to accuse, and these questions aren't meant to be asked between you and me. They're meant to be asked between you and yourself.
*Is your thinking about cause and effect in human behavior clean, or sloppy?
*Is your understanding of why people do the things they do logical and coherent?
*Are you capable of detecting logical inconsistencies and incoherence in things you read and hear?
Okay. Now, assuming you've answered those questions for yourself, and before reading the rest of this post, identify the sloppy thinking in the following explanation of human behavior as it's commonly used by dating gurus:
"Women cheat because it increases the genetic diversity of their offspring, which has evolutionary value."
Please stop reading until you've thought about this.
Now, before I continue - assuming you've come to your conclusions - a few more points:
*This proposition about women and cheating is not actually invalid. It has merit. It's only criminally sloppy in the context in which it's being used.
*If your answer concerns the use of the word "cheat" and the question of whether it's appropriate to frame this behavior as cheating, there's better than even odds you have good mental hygiene. Questioning the subtext of word choice is a useful habit of thought, but isn't what this post aims to address.
The actual root of the sloppy thinking at work here is the seemingly innocent word "because." The reason "because" is problematic is that sociobio (or evo-psych, take your pick) must account for two types of causation in order to explain any human behavior. "Because," on its own, doesn't specify which type of cause it refers to - and this seems to be the source of a great deal of confusion.
In the interests of developing a useful vocabulary for use in explaining the difference between the two, I'm going to crib a couple of terms from Aristotle. He described four kinds of causation; I only need to borrow two.
EFFECTIVE CAUSE is the direct, typically physical cause of an event. If I push a book off of a table, the force exerted by my hand is the effective cause of it falling to the floor.
In contrast, FINAL CAUSE describes causation in terms of purpose. I may own a hammer because I need to drive nails (Final Cause!) but that doesn't mean that the moment I developed a need to drive nails I immediately had a hammer as a result.
Effective Causes are a part of any physical system. Without effective cause nothing would happen.
Final Causes exist in those systems, such as (learned) human behavior and (genetic) evolution, in which an infinite set of possibilities exist but only a very small subset of these are viable.
In case that's not clear, some examples should help:
*FINAL CAUSE: You start up your car so you can drive to the supermarket.
*EFFECTIVE CAUSE: Your car starts because you turned the key in the ignition.
*FINAL CAUSE: You burn a flag because it represents something you object to.
*EFFECTIVE CAUSE: A flag burns because you apply flame to it.
This becomes crucial to the understanding of social dynamics when it comes time to distinguish between the purpose of a behavior and the mechanism by which it is activated, like so:
*FINAL CAUSE: You eat because that way you can survive long enough to reproduce.
*EFFECTIVE CAUSE: You eat because you're hungry.
If your appetite failed and you went to your doctor, he would not concern himself with the overall reproductive value of your eating or not eating. He would concern himself with the mechanism of your appetite.
For the same reason, social theorists should concern themselves first with the mechanisms that drive behavior and only afterwards with the reasons those mechanisms have evolved. Not only are the two distinct, but one is actually more useful than the other.
Worst of all, of course, is to fail to distinguish at all.
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