THINKING FAST, THINKING SLOW, COWS & CARS

 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

© October 14, 2020

As one reader writes, we are only a tiny planet in our galaxy, which is true, while astronomer Carl Sagan, among others, informs us there are possibly billions of other galaxies in the universe. Another writer is concerned with pollution and politics which are also both quite real, but my wonder is how this moves us closer to understanding the most amazing phenomenon of all, man’s consciousness.

Here in 2020 we don’t know precisely what consciousness is or when man was first aware of being a conscious being. Language is considered the first big leap in the evolution of consciousness which occurred 70,000 years ago when people began to leave Africa and disperse around this small planet. Yuval Noah Harari claims language first started out as gossip as people were conscious of each other and could tattle on each other.

Also, evolutionists suggest with language came culture, and with culture a hair-trigger inclination to attribute consciousness to everything around. This included stories they told each other to give them comfort to deal with the terrors of storms, empty spaces, ghosts and gods. Consciousness made them aware that they were, alone, together, which made it natural for them to invent God and gods, and eventually religion so that they would feel less alone. Evolutionist Justin Barrett developed a scale to explain this phenomenon which he called Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD).

Down to the present, we are good at developing devices to explain what we don’t quite understand. This includes “Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow,” which will be discussed shortly. HADD deals with the limbic system of the brain including the reptilian brain that warned the primitive man if the rustling grass was caused by the wind are a lion ready to pounce on him.

This sense of possible danger; this sense that what seems innocent and of no consequence but can prove of real danger is a mechanism that man still possesses today these thousands of years later. But rather than be conscious of this natural defense mechanism in our gene pool, we, as is our nature, make sophisticated complex multifaceted constructions with mathematical  algorithms to provide a small sense of grasping the nature of consciousness, and for that, the Nation of Sweden awards Nobel Prizes.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD AND THE WORD WAS “GOD”

Nature is the god that most confounds man. Nature is a machine of many parts and man since he was aware of his consciousness has attempted to emulate and imitate that machine, studying nature and how it works, and the creatures within Nature and how they behave.

All of man’s inventions have come from first studying Nature, from the flight of birds to behavior of animals in the sea, to the changing seasons of the year, to the Nature of growing plants and animals, to the Nature of lightning and erupting storms, to the power of cascading waters from mountains to rivers below, to the world of insects and even the smaller world of microbes, to the mating practices of mammals, to the comfort of changing "The Word" into the Judaic/Christian God.

As a machine, thinking man in these terms has provided a general framework for understanding consciousness, its adaptive uses, and its continuing evolutionary possibilities. Each time a significant imitation of Nature has occurred, easing man’s anxiety and increasing his comfort with mysterious consciousness, he harbors the small conceit that he was closer to dominating Nature, and no longer needed to fear Nature’s winds or rains, draughts or floods, or, indeed, Nature’s empty spaces, ghosts, or gods, for now he was master of all he observed.

Alas, each time man thinks that "he is in charge," he abruptly is reminded of his fragility with a new disease, a new plague, a new disruption of Nature be it a volcano, landslide, forest fire, tsunami, hurricane, tornado, or an earth quake. These remind conscious man that he is an intruder and has no business living on this planet. With his presence, and insane proliferation, along with his mania for duplicating the Machine that is Nature, he recklessly contaminates Nature to the point of threatening Nature’s own survival.

CONSCIOUSNESS & MAN THE MACHINE

William James wasn’t interested in looking at consciousness as a Machine much less as a mathematical algorithm but as a “stream of consciousness” where concrete objects could be viewed in terms of abstract ideas in order to make sense of reality. He developed this theory in “The Principles of Psychology” (1890).  Novelists such as James Joyce attempted to capture this “stream of consciousness” in such novels as “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” by displaying the richness of the mind at work with snatches of incoherent thought, ungrammatical sentences and free association of ideas and images in words.

Sigmund Freud came along in the early 20th century with his psychoanalytical theory of personality seeing the conscious mind as only the “tip of the iceberg” as the unconscious mind remains hidden from the conscious mind but where feelings, thoughts, urges and emotions reside. He believed the preconscious (unconscious) mind is the key to everything. The irony is that while many scientists refute Freud today they invariably return to his initial theories to build their own, which is the case with Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his “Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow” (2011).

Freud’s preconscious acts like a gatekeeper between the conscious and unconscious mind, allowing information to pass through to conscious awareness. He believes the unconscious influences conscious awareness, sometimes unexpectedly when accidentally we say something that we wish we hadn’t. This is known as a “Freudian slip of the tongue.” He also believes in the power of dreams working on our unconscious. I must confess that what I am writing here was more smoothly and conceptually clear to me last night as I was going to sleep which is surely the natural flow of my unconscious.

We are a machine and think like a machine. Inventors have known this for ages and have first attempted to emulate and imitate that machine, not as tools, but as toys. More than 100 years ago back in Japan Nintendo came into being first selling hand painted playing cards, then electronics with electrical engineers devoting their efforts to eventually creating video games. It was video games that first interested Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and only by accident they came across the fact that Xerox had created the essential computer but wasn’t doing anything with it. These two young men turned from video games to the personal computer armed with the knowledge of the Xerox machine; the rest is history.

The last 100 years has been a journey, often not conscious, to duplicate the machine that we are into a machine that thinks like we think. In May 1997, IBM’s “Deep Blue” chess playing machine, beat Gary Kasparov, the World Chess Champion. This triumph of artificial intelligence (AI) however failed to explain IBM’s late appearance in exploding new market of the personal computer and personal handheld electronic devices.

Could it be that although we are a machine, and have successfully duplicated that machine  to the point of conscious wonderment realizing the amazing capacity of our mind in residence in our brain that we have only collectively revealed the “tip of the iceberg”?

Our minds perform instrumentally in the concrete and terminally in the abstract, which was what William James perceived. Those who could see what is under their feet to see, which the concrete is, don’t always perceive the acres of diamonds underfoot. Alas, the best and the brightest in a corporate sense, as revealed by Xerox and IBM, often miss the obvious, a shortfall invariably picked up by children who have not yet developed the arrogance of infallibility, which is the belief of always knowing what is best, while children learn new things as natural to them and as spontaneous as play.

Perhaps that is because corpocracy is not comfortable in the abstract, where dreams are turned into reality, and where his imagination found Einstein as a child imagining riding a beam of light. He would use this abstraction to create his concrete theory of relativity.

Now, we have psychologists attempting to reify the abstract, such as happiness, into a mathematical algorithm whereas Alan W. Watts claims intuitively, and I believe he has a point, “once you define happiness, you lose it.”

THIKING FAST, THINKING SLOW

We have made a century retreat from person centered psychology to data centered psychology: i.e., from the semantic philosophical psychology of William James; to the “talking cures” of Freud with his Oedipus and Electra complex, and Morality Principle (Superego or Parent), Reality Principle (Ego or Adult) to Pleasure Principle (Id or Child); to Freud’s three principles viewed in transactional analytical terms by Eric Berne in Games People Play; to Thomas Harris’s transactional analysis in terms of “I’m Okay, You’re Okay”; to John Dusay’s transactional analysis in terms of Egograms with the Critical Parent and Nurturing Parent; Free Child and Adaptive Child; to Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology, who has given us the inferiority complex, and the introvert and extrovert; to Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”; to the existential psychology of R. D. Laing, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre; then there is The Divided Self by Laing, The Saturated Self by Kenneth Gergen, The Sexual Self by Avodah Offit, Disowned Self by Nathaniel Branden.

The Escaping Self by Roy Baumeister, The Undiscovered Self by Carl G. Jung, The Private Self by Arnold Modell, Self Imagery by Emmett Miller, Identity & Youth by Erik Erikson all of which are in my Library, as are The Psychological Society by Martin Gross, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution by P. D. Ouspensky, The Homeless Mind by Peter Berger and relational psychology by Carl Rogers in On Being a Person, as representative of person centered psychology which has been fading the last quarter century.

William James, psychology emanated comfortably from philosophy, but now the focus of psychology is increasingly data centered as if man is an inanimate machine while these data collectors and assessors would strongly deny this assessment. That said, man is a machine of many interrelated parts in what appears as data driven psychological research. As such, there appears a “gear head” quality to research and data collection consistent with engineering, mathematics and the physical sciences. This is apparent in Nobel Laureate for Economics (2002), Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow” (2011).

This review looks at this book in terms of two modes of thought: System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, instinctive and emotional; System 2 is slow, deliberate and logical. The book delineates ration and non-rational motivation with triggers associated with each type of thinking and how they complement each other. For example, the author shows how people frame their choices to avoid difficult questions by instead focusing on easier ones. Leon Festinger introduced us to this phenomenon with his cognitive dissonance theory some sixty years ago.

You get a sense of the author’s frustration in the second section when he explains why people have trouble thinking statistically and heuristically, or like a well-oiled machine. In the middle of the book, he  looks at “two selves,” which differ little with the selves already mentioned. There is the “experiencing self” and “remembering self.” The “experiencing self” is concerned with well-being as a separate self to the remembered self which is a self that polls attempt to measure with statistical correlation coefficients. Kahneman found these two measures in terms of of happiness diverging, which is interesting.  These two selves are instrumental or concrete phenomenon whereas “happiness” is an abstraction or terminal value, or something felt.  Terminal values don't as a rule lend themselves comfortably to mathematical algorithms whereas instrumental values do.

The author's claims “the remembering self” does not care about the duration of a pleasant or unpleasant experience. Instead, it retrospectively rates an experience by the maximum or minimum sensation of the experience, and by the way it ends. The remembering self dominates the patient's ultimate conclusion. This is treated as “a discovery” whereas William James spoke of consciousness as establishing the sociality of selfhood.  

Where Kahneman is interesting is in terms of his two thought systems and how they arrive at different results given the same input. He uses effectively such terms and concepts as coherence, attention, laziness, association, jumping to conclusions, all of which people do, reducing this down to WYSIATI (What you see is all there is), and from this how we form judgments. Obviously, System 1 and System 2 touch on how we reason or fail to reason in our decision-making, and as I attempt to show in The Fisher Paradigm©™ this has taken on greater significance in this electronic age as a marketing tool.

A reader whom I respect had this to say about this book:

In adult learning of significant stuff, it is essential to understand how your subconscious mind allocates your efforts - instantly without your awareness. Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book "Thinking Fast and Slow" is a priceless encyclopedia on what's forming your opinions. It was produced to help guys above the mentor line. While those below the line understand it, they ignore it. Those above the mentor line commit it to practice. Cheers.

Kahneman does this examining heuristic (i.e., mental shortcuts to personal problem solving) biases with the anchoring effect of substituting simplistic questions for difficult ones and ignoring the laws of probability, while maintaining an optimistic bias with the illusion of control. This includes the fallacy of over-estimating the benefits and minimizing the risks in the fallacy of framing the problem.  Engineer and author William L. Livingston IV has written widely and perceptively on this subject.

This Nobel Laureate has a way of popularizing concepts with catchy designations such as the “sunk cost fallacy” in which good money is thrown at bad outcomes even though bad results inevitably continue. Then there is the fallacy of overconfidence in that the mind thinks it knows what it doesn’t but behaves as if it does. This leads to what Kahneman calls “loss averse,” or playing not to lose rather than playing to win, and of course invariably losing.

None of this is virgin territory as it has been amply explored many times before. On the other hand, his take on “happiness” is less than convincing. We know as little about the nature of happiness as we do of the nature of consciousness. Indeed, there are many journals on happiness and yet happiness seems as elusive as it is to predict ordinary human behavior.

While one reader cites the encyclopedia content of “Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow,” which is impressive, it suffers the replication crisis common to the discipline with a Replication Index of 14, which is essentially no reliability. To Kahneman’s credit, he confesses to having “Too much faith in underpowered studies.” Others have noted the irony in that Kahneman makes the mistake in judgment that he accuses the ones he has studied.

SINCE WORLD WAR TWO . . .

Since WWII, a war which would change American society forever, few writers of any period have looked ahead so boldly and sagaciously to anticipate so clearly the sharp cultural and emotional split of its society with its prosaic past as many writers have rushed to show.

David Riesman (1909 – 2002) in “The Lonely Crowd” (1950) is about the rise of the middle class and the pull of being “other-directed” rather than “self-directed,” where the “other-directed” tend to conform to the crowd whereas the “self-directed” are inclined to be individualistic and have their own agenda. Riesman always felt his book was misunderstood. He writes:

“The gyroscopic mechanism allows the inner-directed person to appear far more independent than he really is: he is no less a conformist to others than the other-directed person, but the voices to which he listens are more distant, and of an older generation, their cues internalized in his childhood.”

That said, the central tenet of “The Lonely Crowd” is that the average American subscribes to a collective ethic rather than the prevailing mythic notion of rugged individualism to which most Americans espouse.

William H. Whyte (1917 – 1999) in “The Organization Man” (1956) was writing about what in retrospect was the “Golden Age of American Commerce,” or the first two decades after WWII when something approaching equity existed in terms of demographics and economic realities, indeed, when “America was great,” a condition candidate Donald Trump wanted to restore with this effective campaign slogan in 2016 “Make America Great Again.”

Whyte’s attention, however, was on the rise of the new managerial class profiling two ethics in conflict in the new manager: the imbalance between the Protestant Work Ethic of hard work, thrift and competitive struggle at the heart of American achievement and the ecstatic attraction of power, prestige, wealth and control by sublimating individualism to the conformity of the corporate group.

Whyte argued, “Man himself is isolated and meaningless, and only as he collaborates with others does he become worthwhile.”

Like “The Lonely Crowd,” Whyte was saying in “The Organization Man” that ethics was now reduced to what is legal.

Sociologist Vance Packard (1914 – 1996) wrote a series of books that caught the attention of many Americans as these books dealt with kitchen cabinet issues.

“The Hidden Persuaders” (1957) deals with how advertisers had come to rely on the research of psychological methodology to persuade people to buy what they didn’t necessarily want or need.

“The Status Seekers” (1959) asks the question: "Are we a classless society?” Packard answers his own question resolutely: “not only are we a class conscious society, we measure, assess, judge, critique, approve, and dismiss nearly everything in terms of status symbols to gain approval with peers, neighbors, and co-workers.”

Packard points out people may take a lower paying job if it is with a more prestigious company; may deny or hide their working class roots by living beyond their means, or completely cut ties with their more modest ethnic roots.

“The Waste Makers” (1960) finds Vance Packard coining another disturbing phrase to match his “status seekers,” which is “planned obsolescence,” where he claims manufacturers purposely produce products with limited shelf life so that the consumer will be forced to make renewed investments in these products, particularly in home appliances.

Consistent with this message, “The Waste Makers” is based on buying more and more stuff that we don’t need or necessarily want which has come to create a “throw away” consumer culture. If planned obsolescence is part of the corporate game, consumers obligingly cooperate by becoming bored with what they have long before its usefulness expires. We see this with homemakers who have to have a “new kitchen,” or automobile owners who have to have the latest model, and the same for owners’ of laptops, iPads and iPhones.

Packard writes:

"Already watches are being sold as fashion accessory items... Already the stockpiling and disposing of subsidized but unwanted agricultural products have become a world-wide scandal. Already some home furnishings are being built to break down within a few years."

The people of the United States are in a sense becoming a nation riding the tiger. They must continue to consume more and more, they are warned, or the magnificent economic machine may turn and devour them. They must step up their individual consumption, whether they have pressing needs or not. The economy depends on them.

“The Naked Society” (1964) was the first book to anticipate the enormous impact technological change would have on the life of the individual in terms of invading his privacy, monitoring his purchases, manipulating his tastes, and managing his opinions.

When you consider at the time of this book’s publication, technology was limited to data collection by advertisers and the government (e.g., President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society) along with hidden microphones, concealed cameras, and the polygraph lie detector to what exists today in the “Information Age.” It was a bold prognosis by this social scientist on limited data.

American historian and social critic Christopher Lasch (1932 – 1994) gave us the phase “conspicuous consumption” and how consuming had become the most predominate narcotic of the age in “The Culture of Narcissism” (1978).

Lasch sees the narcissistic personality liberated from superstitions of the past only to embrace new cults, feeling less free from ancient taboos finding neither sexual nor spiritual peace in his consuming delirium. So, today, as he observes, anyone of any means is in therapy.

Lasch writes:

The new therapies spawned by the human potential movement teach the individual will is all powerful and totally determines one’s fate; thus they intensify the isolation of the self.

“The Minimal Self” (1984) deals with psychic survival in troubled times. Lasch argues people have lost confidence in the future. This was written at the height of the nuclear arms race between Russian, China and the United States. Crime was on the rise as was terrorism, while the environment was deteriorating due to global warming along with long-term economic decline.

Young people were shying away from long-term emotional commitments which presupposed a secure and orderly world which they were skeptical ever existed. Self-concerns had progressed to self-indulgence while the equilibrium sought was of a minimal self, no longer an imperial or dominant self, or the self that was prominent immediately after WWII.

The drama now playing out, according to Lasch, was finding a sense of personal survival in a collapsing climate of global warming and psychological accord while feeling a sense of lost pride and dignity, or as victims of circumstances and in control of nothing.

Lasch writes:

In industry, the exclusion of workers from control over the design of work went hand in hand with the rise of a new and profoundly undemocratic institution, the corporation, which has centralized the technical knowledge once administered by craftsmen.

“The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991) represents Lasch’s attempt to redefine the boundaries of political debate and enable the reader to confront limits without despair. He sees political ideologies vapid with the opposition between the left and the right having lost the power to inspire men and women to any kind of constructive action. He centers his argument on the incompatibility between democracy and “progress,” which has controlled Western ideology for the past 200 years.

The idea of progress rests on the belief that human wants are insatiable, that new wants appear as soon as old wants are satisfied, and that steadily rising levels of comfort will be like Nirvana with ever expanding productive expansion to meet ever rising expectations. This requires the democratization of consumption which is interpreted as happiness and the “good life.”

But as Lasch sees it, this surreal appetite for luxury, novelty and excitement in the progressive tradition of unlimited abundance clashes with traditional values of limits rooted in pride, sense of place and worth realized through competence, responsibility and citizenship.

Daniel Yankelovich (1924 – 2017) went from a professor of psychology to finding his niche as a public opinion analyst and social scientist. Like Christopher Lasch, he wasn’t politically correct in his data collection and analysis and was widely attacked for discovering what most Americans didn’t want to learn about themselves.

In “New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down” (1981), Yankelovich tracks how Americans since the 1970s have loosened their attachment to the ethic of self-denial and deferred to instant gratification doing and having everything “now.” At the same time, the economy appeared less abundant as it was undergoing double digit unemployment and double digit inflation. In this turbulence climate of clashing values, he claims 80 percent of Americans commenced to seek self-fulfillment at the expense of the oldest ethic of all, delayed gratification with the supportive discipline of self-denial.

Yankelovich writes:

Any discussion of self-fulfillment is confronted with a troublesome question of semantics. What is the relationship between self-fulfillment and success? Are the two ideas interchangeable? Do we seek self-fulfillment through becoming successful, and do we label as successful whatever brings fulfillment? The distinction between success and self-fulfillment may have been blurred in the past, but increasingly Americans are differentiating them. Indeed, the lives of some people embody a fierce conflict between the two concepts.

If anything is clear, it is that since WWII to the present, Americans are not happy campers as it is apparent that they have misplaced their moral compass and lost their way.  The more they deny this dilemma, as these authors attempt to show, the more they are consumed with self-doubt easily escaping into the clime of Eric Hoffer’s “true believers” in some kind of mass movement.

“Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow” sold over a million copies the first year of its publication in 2011, which tells us a lot about the hunger of people to have someone reassure them that they are on the right track and that there is hope for them.   

COWS & CARS AND THE MERRY DANCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION

The world has 1.5 billion cows and billions more of other grazing animals that emit dozens of polluting gases, but principally methane. Two-thirds of all ammonia comes from cows, an amount of methane comparable to the pollution produced by a care in a day.

Livestock are the destroyers of the environment of which we seldom hear anything, representing 18 percent of the global greenhouse gases, which is more than cars, planes and other forms of transportation. Cars produce CO2, which is not as damaging as methane gases.

A United Nations report identifies the world’s growing herds of cattle is the greatest threat to the climate, forests and other wildlife. These methane producing cows are blamed for a host of other environmental crimes which includes acid rain to the introduction of alien species, from producing deserts to creating dead zones in the oceans, from poisoning rivers and drinking water to destroying the coral reefs.

The 400-page Food & Agricultural Organization Report titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow” cites specifically that burning fuel to produce fertilizer to grow feed for these cows, then to slaughter them and transport them to produce meat, clearing vegetation for their grazing, produces 9 percent of all emissions of CO2 from vehicles, the most common of greenhouse gas. Then cows’ wind and burping and manure emit more than one third of the emissions of methane, which warms the world 20 times faster than CO2.

Livestock produce more than 100 other polluting gases including more than two-thirds of the world’s emission of ammonia, one of the main causes of acid rain.

The Ranching Report adds that “the major driver of deforestation” worldwide is from overgrazing turning a fifth of all pastures into deserts. Cows also soak up vast amounts of water, taking in a staggering 990 liters of water to produce one liter of milk.

Waste from feedlots and fertilizer washes down to rivers and eventually to the sea killing coral reefs and creating “dead zones” in our oceans devoid of life. This is apparent in the Gulf of Mexico from the waste from US beef production that is carried down the Mississippi to the gulf.

The report concludes, “Unless drastic changes are not made, the massive damage done by livestock will more than double by 2050 as the ever increasing demand for meet continues.”

THEN THERE ARE CARS

Cars are often cited as the golden standard of environmental destruction. We know that millions of cars cough out CO2 that is harmful to the environment, but what of a burger? We don’t instinctively associate eating a burger with climate change, but the dark side of meat consumption does give cars a run for the money. Consider this: 14.5 to 18 percent of total global greenhouse pollution is from cars, but the transportation of meat products is responsible for 14 percent of these emissions.

Yes, driving cars is not good for the environment, but meat production is unexpectedly far worse for the environment. You can see CO2 emissions coming out of your car, but you cannot see methane emissions coming out of your hamburger. That said, meat consumption across the planet is on the increase with it expected to rise by 70 percent by 2050.

When I was a boy, as an act of penitence we were informed that to eat meat on Friday, the day that Jesus is said to have died, was a mortal sin in the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics got away from this until it was again reinstated by Catholic Bishops of America in 1966, never considering it was also an act of environmental responsibility. Imagine what impact it would have environmentally if 330 million Americans changed their mindset and did not eat meat one day every week.

Finally, cows are the main culprit if not the only threat to our environment. Methane, which is a single carbon atom with four hydrogen atoms attached has a molecular structure or CH4. A cow’s chief form of methane is not cow’s farts, but cow’s burps as 90 to 95 percent of the methane released by cows comes out of their mouths, while 5 to 10 percent is released in the form of manure and passing gas. A Texas laboratory is looking at the possibility of reducing the methane emissions of cows by 50 percent by feeding them seaweed instead of feed, and onions and probiotics.

Changing our mode of transportation to electric cars and electric trains between major American cities is in the implementing stage, already passed the exploratory stage. There is always answers as Daniel Kahneman has shown if we will face our problems and accept ourselves as we are rather than how we would like to imagine ourselves as being.