The Future of Reasoning Hey Vsauce! Michael here. Where is your mind? Is it in your head? I mean, thatâs where your brain is â and
your brain remembers, plans, makes judgements, solves problems ⌠but you also remember
and plan with things like these and this. And you solve problems and make judgements
with all sorts of other stuff, too. The more you think about it, the more you
realize that while the brain is a wet lump of fat and protein, no firmer than a glob
of tofu, the MIND is something much larger: itâs an ever-expanding organ of tissue AND
wood and stone and steel. And people. Because of communication we can even make
OTHER PEOPLE extensions of our minds. We can access their memories and perceptions
and knowledge by simply asking. Or not. I donât need to learn how to fix a car AND
practice medicine AND vulcanize rubber OR remember everything ⌠other people are doing
that for me just as I do things for them. We are a species of individuals that is also
one big interdependent lumbering growth. A frantic blur of flesh and concrete. A âtechno sapienâ powered by imaginations
and passions made real by a hallowed faculty we call REASON. Reason, it is said, guides us to truer knowledge
and better decisions. Itâs allowed us to increase life-expectancy,
suffer less, work together better, and itâs bound to take us further and higher until
the end of time. Or is it? The organ we USE to reason takes millions
of years to evolve, but the fruits of reason grow rapidly and are ever accelerating. In the next four decades, weâre expected
to build the equivalent of another new york city every month More concrete was installed in the last two
decades outside the US than the US installed during the entire 20th century. This growth means that quality of life around
the world is rising. It means that electricity, manufactured goods,
food, comfort and transportation are all becoming more common and accessible. But there are hints that reason and logic
are struggling aginst the complexity of it all; against our growing dependence on the
things weâve built and their unintended consequences. Nearly every part of life as we know it today
involves or relies on a process that releases molecules with lopsided electrical charges. This property causes them to absorb and re-emit
thermal radiation, pinging it around so that it escapes into space more slowly. Having more warmer parcels of air means stronger
weather events. They canât be pinned on any particular extreme
storm, but they make extreme storms in general more extreme and frequent. Whatâs a stake isnât just âbad weatherâ
itâs disaster: itâs more lives lost, more property lost, itâs more droughts, more
hunger, more famine, more people needing refuge, and a even greater reliance on the very things
that caused the problems in the first place. In total, we release about 51 billion tons
of such gases every year and we need to release zero. But how do you re-think ⌠everything? Who gets to direct the costs and tradeoffs? How do you achieve collaboration between nearly
every local and national government when what works in one place wonât work everywhere,
when decisions effect jobs in one place and food in another. When not just things need to be re-thought,
but also habits and traditions and values. How do you achieve consensus when a problem
isnât obvious to the senses, is far away in space and time, requires solutions that
affect people in different ways, and as a product of science, always carries some uncertainty? The philosopher Timothy Morton calls something
so massively distributed in time and space and so viscous â so STICKY that it adheres
to all that touch it, a HYPEROBJECT. Every civilizations that grows at the speed
of reason must at some point face hyperobjects. In fact, the fact that we still havenât
found evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth has been brought up as evidence that
some sort of GREAT FILTER, might exist that few civilizations manage to get past. That a hyperobject like our impact on the
planet might be such a great filter is not a new idea. What itâll take to solve it is the topic
of Bill Gateâs HOW TO AVOID A CLIMATE DISASTER. And I decided to do this video in partnership
with him and his team because the way we deal with hyperobjects reveals a lot about the
mind. Itâs easy â and common! â to think that
we would all be better off if everyone was just more rational. But what if reasoning wasnât built for what
weâve become? Letâs begin by looking at behavioral inertia. Behavioral inertia is the tendency to keep
doing what youâre already doing. Status quo bias. It can be a frustrating bias if you desire
change, but its origin isnât a flaw. If an organism has managed to survive long
enough to reproduce and provide and care for its offspring, then the state of its world,
was sufficient for its genes to spread. Thatâs all it takes to persist. The types of organisms we see around us will
naturally be those that managed to persist and didnât, after reaching the point at
which they could persist, rock the boat too much. Behavioral inertia can help slow down the
accumulation of unintended consequences and the loss of ideas that work, but it can also
slow down innovation and adaptation. If the environmental impacts of our society
were more immediate and un-ignorable, it wouldnât be so tempting to apply this inertial brake. But emissions are invisible and their consequences
arenât immediate or local. They impact future people and people far away. Those who are different from us, poorer than
us, people we will never meet. This may be one of the first challenges advancing
civilizations face: weilding not just the power of technology and distributed cognition,
but also the responsibilities. Extending not just the mind but also EMPATHY
could certainly be a great filter. Our lower instincts may bias us, but surely,
REASON can help us navigate towards the future we want, right? Well, what IS reason? Itâs a way of making inferences. An inference is any new information extracted
from the information you already have. We make inferences all the time â every
living thing does. We donât have measuring-tape tentacles that
shoot from our eyes, and what actually enters our brain is just a 2D image, but our brains
nonetheless INFER depth by attending to cues like stereopsis, occultation, perspective,
parallax, size⌠When this happens, we accept it as reality. We arenât aware of the visual processing
that made it possible and donât have to be. If, however, we do consciously consider WHY
a certain conclusion was reached, then BOOM thatâs REASONING. Reasoning is the process of making inferences
not automatically and instrinctively, but by looking at facts and seeing what conclusion
they support. When Eratosthenes calculated the circumference
of the Earth to within a percentage or two of the value accepted today, he didnât do
it by MEASURING the Earth and he didnât just percieve it as self-evident, he INFERRED
it from what he knew about shadows and how long it took camels to move. Stories like that make it easy to believe
that reasoning evolved because it supercharged our abilities; it clearly moves us towards
truer conclusions, better decisions, and knowledge no other species could infer. Attempts to describe the rules of good, orderly
reason, became logic and mathematics, concepts so general and abstract that while we were
still animals, armed with them, we were no longer beasts. But thatâs the rub, isnât it? If reasoning is so great, why are we the only
species with such a sophisticated grasp of it? And if its purpose is truth and good judgement,
why donât we all agree on everything? These questions make up what Hugo Mercier
and Dan Sperber call the Enigma of Reason. Itâs tempting to think that disagreements
happen because while IâM being rational, those who disagree with me are being irrational. Urgh! If only people would use reason and logic. Whatâs happened to the world! Thatâs a fair complaint if youâre arguing
over logic puzzles, but the world is not a logic puzzle. this, however, is: Paul is looking at Mary. Mary is looking at Peter. Paul is married. Peter is unmarried. Is a married person looking at an unmarried
person? Yes. No. Or not enough information to decide? think about it. The answer is YES. You may have thought thereâs no way to know,
because we donât know if Mary is married. But she either is or she isnât. And if she IS, then she, a married person,
is looking at Peter, an unmarried person. If she ISNâT then Paul, a married person,
is looking at her, an unmarried person. No matter what Maryâs deal is, the answer
will be YES. When people get this puzzle wrong and the
correct answer is explained to them, they almost always immedaitely see why itâs right
and change their mind. Life is not usually like that. Now, take a look at this logical syllogism: All elephants are awesome. Michael is an elephant. Therefore, Michael is awesome. This conclusion is logically valid. But itâs not SOUND. The conclusion follows from these assumptions,
but are these assumptions true? No. I am NOT an elephant. Also, this premise ⌠is subjective. What does it MEAN to be awesome? Can you measure it with an awesome-ometer? So you can see why, when analyzing something
like our impact on the planet, logic can only be a partial tool. If some people have more to lose than others,
who gets to decide which are fair? Still, though, it would seem that reasoning
should be able help out here. If each of us would just attend to ONLY the
facts, surely weâd all recognize the same, reasonable approach. Problem is, thatâs not how reasoning works. Since the scientific study of human reasoning
began about a hundred years ago, itâs been found again and again that weâre not only
BAD at reasoning, lazy and biased, but almost seem PROGRAMMED to be bad. Like the flaws are intentional⌠In an episode of Mind Field I once used a
magician to pull off a little experiment. He asked people to look at two faces and choose
which of the two they would prefer to work with, placing their preferences in one pile,
and those they rejected into another. Then, the pile of people they picked were
shown again and each person was asked to provide a REASON for why they chose that person. But with a little slight of hand, the magician
managed to sneak in some of the faces they had just rejected. Amazingly, the majority of people didnât
even notice the trick. Not only that, they were able to effortlessly
explain the reasons behind their choice â a choice they never actually made. Remembering faces youâve only seen briefly
isnât the easiest thing to do, but other studies have shown that even if the task involves
answering questions about oneâs political beliefs â things we would seemingly have
a firmer grasp on â still nearly half of participants will fail to notice that answers
they gave have been reversed when theyâre later asked to explain them. Point is, we seem practically BUILT to give
reasons for whatever we think we must, and NOT the reasons we actually used to reach
a conclusion. What if we donât even USE reasons to form
our beliefs? Letâs talk about INTUITIONS. Our brains have evolved over millions of years
to react to the world around us in brilliant ways with little to no input from us. For example, when you notice that someone
is upset, youâve donât consciously think, âok, so their eyebrows and oriented like
that, their speaking is curt, their posture ⌠hmmmm ⌠ah ha! those are reasons to
conclude that they are upset!â Instead, the belief that they may be upset
was just apparent. You intuited it. You âknowâ it without exactly know HOW
you exactly you came to know it. The mood recognizing parts of your brain operate
in a way that is opaque to your awareness. BUT if someone asks you, why you think theyâre
upset, you can nonetheless produce all sorts of reasons â some may have been the ones
your brain actually attended to. But theyâre all just guesses. Instead of using reasoning to COME to conclusions,
we use conclusions to come to reasons. To be fair, we CAN go the other way. We love puzzles and when we donât have a
strong intuition either way, we can sit down and mull over various reason to think one
thing or another. Our love of puzzles suggests that reasoning
has a survival value. Organisms that found it pleasurable would
be more likely to use it. But when we reason alone, even when we have
no motivation to reach any particular conclusion, we STILL exhibit deep biases that seem less
like mistakes and more like features. For example, itâs been shown that between
two otherwise similar products, people will prefer to buy the one with more features â even
if they donât want those features, never plan to use them, and think theyâre all
pointless and over complicated. Why? Well it might be that we find such decisions
easier to justify ⌠to OTHERS. We wonât feel embarrassed if someone criticizes
us for getting fewer features. After decades of findings like this, Hugo
Mercier and Dan Sperber began to hypothesize that reasoning to help us make better decisions,
but instead, to help us make social decisions. Humans inhabit a cognitive niche on this planet. We arenât strong or sharp or hidden or venomous,
instead, our advantage comes from cognition: reasoning and cooperation. We can plan hunt, build traps, and engage
in coordinated strategies that can be tested and modified on the fly, not by millennia
of evolution. Reasons allow us to so those things. Itâs hard to convince people that your intuitions
are true. But if you can give REASONS for them, its
a whole heck of a lot easier to convince other people that youâre right. Reason also allows us to justify ourselves
in the eyes of others. To explain who we are and express the kinds
of reasons we like, what other people can expect from us, and what we will likely expect
from them. This social theory of reasoning helps explain
why two people can earnestly and rationally arrive at different views. They each have their own unique brain and
values and dispositions and experiences and THATâS what drove their thinking. The reasons they give may or may not be the
REAL reasons they came to their conclusions, but itâs the best anyone can do. The social theory also explains why people
tend to give such weak reasons for their beliefs at first or when their intended audience doesnât
need much convincing. It would be a waste of time and cognitive
reasources to construct grand slam reasons for everything I said and did and thought
when it wasnât necessary. Instead, I can off-load some of the work to
other people. If I say, âI want to have lunch at ABC Burgersâ
my friend might say, âah, no thanks, I had burgers yesterdayâ and I might reply back,
âoh well thatâs no problem, they also have hot dogs and great saladsâ But if my friend said âah, no thanks, Iâm
trying to spend less money eating out this monthâ I might reply, âoh well ABC Burgers
is really cheap and I;ve got a coupon!â Whatâs going on there is that Iâm providing
reasons only as my interlocutor presses for them. If they press harder and harder, my reasons
will become better and better until either I win them over, or we come to some different,
more harmonious decision. So when people appear to be lazy reasoners
or to have bad reasons or none at all, itâs usually just the case that theyâre using
reason as it evolved to function; socially. It starts off weak, improving if others push
it and always tailoring its work to an intended audience. the social theory of reasons can even explain
the existence of biases that otherwise make little sense. For example, it would seem that in coming
to conclusions about the world, it would behoove an organism to pay particular attention to
information that went against what it believed. That way, they would be able to adjust their
beliefs making them truer, more general, and more complete. To a certain extent, that IS what happens
⌠but not always. When someone âdoes their own researchâ
they often come to the very conclusion they wanted after all. When a person strongly believes that our impact
on the planet isnât a problem, they tend to gravitate towards reasons it might not
be and see such reasons in all kinds of data. This is called the CONFIRMATION BIAS: our
tendency to look for, prefer, and interpret information so that it confirms what we already
think. It frustrates our ability to accept new, inconvienent
data and is a problem for the intellectualist view of reason. If reason is for finding truth and making
better decisions, why would it have this major weakness? Because, the social theory says, reasoning
is a GROUP ACTIVITY. If I think that option A is true and the best,
and you think option B is true and the best, if we both researched BOTH options and sifted
through reasons in support of BOTH options, we would both have twice the work to do than
we would if, instead, I simply came up with reason for why I was right, and you attended
to reasons for why YOU were right. The confirmation bias at least HALVES the
cognitive work that must be done. Now sometimes a lone reasoner will have a
bad idea. Or a decent idea with some bad parts. The reasons they have to justify and argue
for it will be suffiencent for them and those who intuitively agree but may be weak. But subjected to deliberation, put forth into
the machine of collective thought, it can be evaulated and judged not by one mind or
a group of minds thinking alike, but by something special ⌠the crowd. Humans have long known of the WISDOM OF THE
CROWDS: the phenomenon by which a collection of many people can process information into
a conclusion better than any one person could do alone. Itâs why we donât trust big decisions
to a single person, no matter how educated or powerful they are. Instead, we ask a group of to deliberate. To reason together. In this way, the biases and errors of each
is smoothed out and the decision wiser. In a famous example, itâs been repeatedly
shown that if you ask a bunch of people to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, youâll
find that the average of all of their answers is CLOSER TO THE REAL NUMBER than any one
individual was alone. Even the smartest individual. What happens is that although some people
may guess a number way too big, that mistake is balanced out by the fact that others will
inevitably guess a number way too small. All together, their disagreement evens out
into spectacular accuracy. We have now arrived at the problem. Reasoning evolved to be used socially where
many different perspectives had to all deliberate towards a common conclusion. Such contexts are becoming less and less common. And it is becoming easier and easier to simply
be a lone reasoner, justifying only a particular viewpoint without doing the harder work of
deliberating and acting. The internet gives voices to more perspectives
than ever before in our history, but it also makes it easy to disengage from accountability
and find places where everyone believes what you do. Furthermore, because of technology, we confront
more issues more rapidly than ever before that weâre expected to have opinions about. And the growing complexity and specialization
of the modern world makes it difficult for each of us to have well-informed prepared
reasons for the acceleraeting accretion of intutions we must form. in response, we look for lone reasoners who
can defend our intuitions for us. They reasons they give donât need to be
good, just good ENOUGH that we can feel like justification exists. In the past, unconvincing reasons had to be
painted on sandwich boards. But now, the democritization of communication
means that even unpopular, unconvincing, nonsensical ideas can be presented with the same trust-inducing
typefaces and professional look as common ones. Those who disagree may challenge the reasons
youâve been given, show them to be contradictory, and produce betters ones for THEIR side, but
to what end? Itâs all preparation for a debate that never
comes. You play a very small role in deciding how
society is run. Even if a good faith discussion between a
representative slice of America came to a resolution, if nothing can come of it, why
not just throw shade and sick burns or revel in the pleasure of reasoning by treating everything
like a big giant puzzle? It's easy to think that it doesnât matter,
because after all, those in charge, the brilliant scientists and powerful billionaires, will
surely come to our rescue. Some giant TECHNOSALVATION is surely on the
horizon. Perhaps it is. But everything we know about reason suggets
that those implementing it should be held accountable by as many different perspectives
as possible. Leaders could lead deliberations and be elected
for their ability to moderate social reasoning, but thatâs boring! Why lead when you could follow: look at what
some people believe and generate reasons for why theyâre right, and theyâll love it! Of course, the hard work â the REAL work
â the work that truly elevates us on this planet, is not in telling poeple that theyâre
right, but in trying to convince others and in so doing, use reason as it evolved to be
used. The future of reason may in fact be the past
of reason. In practice, what does all this look like? Some researchers have gone so far as to recommend
national deliberation days where citizens celebrate by literally joining small groups
and talking through their opinions and comparing reasons. Tests of such strategies have shown that a
return to the small, targeted discussions our reasoning abilities evolved to excel in
leaves all participants with a greater understanding of not just what they believe and why, but
about decisions that could actually be made and actions that could be taken. Others have gone even further, recommending
that the true future of reason at its best is the construction of a lottocracy. A form of government where decisions are made
not by elected leaders, but by people literally chosen at random. We decide the fate of a person this way, why
not the fate of the people? What IF decisions were made not by politicians
alone, but at least occasionally by groups of actual citizens representing differences
in thought, not just geography, who were brought together and paid for their time to learn
from experts and then deliberate on an assigned issue until a conclusion was reached or, at
the least, a recommendation? Instead of being motivated by re-election,
money, attention, and power, individuals chosen at random would have only their conscious
to guide them. Special interests and corporations wouldnât
be able to cozy up to those likely to be elected â if any one of us could some day serve,
theyâd have cozy up to and protect ⌠all of us. Instead of the learning and deliberation being
done by people you never meet with offices in buildings you canât access, gradually,
over time, more and more of your very own neighbors would have had the honor. People chosen at random would obviously lack
the same celebrity status and mandate that elected leaders cultivate and achieve â and
iconic figures we relate to arenât bad â but our understanding of reasoning is making it
more and more clear that we evolved not to be leave thinking up to a few great minds,
but to the authorty of THE great mind. The lumbering organ of thought that is everyone
and everything. This is, in fact, how democracy first worked:
lotteries were used to fill many political positions in Anceint Athens. Aristotle explained that âthe appointment of magistrates by lot is
thought to be democratic, and the election of them is oligrchicâ where an oligrachy is government by only a
small number of people. Regardless of HOW reason is brought back to
its social roots, if we can build more and better areanas for deliberation and use them
to apply reason properly to hyperobjects like the impact of emissions on the planet, weâll
have taught one heck of a lesson to people a hundred, a thousand years into the future. I like to think that although widening participation
will be difficult, it might provide us all with a kind of existential security. The impact of emission on our planet is not
going to be the last hyperproblem we face. If we can do a good job with it, maybe far
in the future, when our civilization has advanced to the point at which people can be quantumly
re-recreated or something, theyâll look back at our time and say, hey, letâs bring
them all back to life. We could use the cooperative abilities they
had then. Ultimately, the old saying that âhistory
is the great teacherâ isnât a bad guide. We will all some day be teachers ourselves
because some day we will all be history, too. we will some day be the ancients. And we can choose what that will mean. And as always, thanks for watching.
What are we? Where is our mind? Where did his watch go between 10:56 and 12:36?
We need answers Michael!
I've never heard of the idea of lottocracy until now, but it is a really fascinating idea, and the more I think about it the better it sounds. It has some issues, such as wasting some time bringing average citizens up to speed with various issues, but I really think it could work. You could replace Congress in the US with a lottery of citizens, selected by the same way juries are currently, and have them vote on what topics they wish to tackle in their time there. I think you still need to maintain a single head of the executive branch, but you could have them elected by vote with this committee of selected citizens in "Congress".
"More concrete was installed in the last two decades outside the US than the US installed during the entire 20th century." (02:15)
that... doesn't sound impressive? *outside the US* is much larger than the US. Is it really a shocker that a lot of concrete has recently been used in the rest of the world? Maybe I'm misunderstanding
It sounds like Morton's hyperobject concept is similar to (or a subset of) the occult concept of the egregore. The traditional way to deal with hyperobjects/egregores is through development of a metabelief system that helps us inform our memetic immune systems and direct our imaginative efforts.
Anyone know where the thumbnail is from?