Breaking Human
Distinctively Anthropic Modes of Thought
Cognitive biases are persistent patterns of thought and judgment that fail to exemplify standards of reasonableness that we ourselves would assent to if we were to be explicitly presented with them. (This is not any kind of “official” definition, but only a definition off the top of my head.) This implies that we are unaware of our cognitive biases, since, if they are explicitly brought to our attention, we will recognize the failure of our judgment and, if intellectually honest, we will either have to revise that judgment or adopt different standards of reasonableness (and which latter may not be possible for us). This sort of deliberation almost never occurs in the heat of passion, but in a calm moment it is sometimes possible to point out an individual’s cognitive biases and get that individual to understand that they are making judgments that contradict principles they claim to espouse.
Because we can revise either our judgments (often, poor judgments made in the heat of passion) or the principles by which we claim to render judgments (often, uncritically examined principles adopted out of intellectual laziness or carelessness), there is a certain “wiggle room” for the individual to adjust themselves to the world. If the judgment seems right, we can revise our principles; if the principle seems right, we can revise our judgment. While this sounds like a form of corruption — a kind of unprincipled epistemic opportunism — it is, rather, admirably rational to be willing to revise one’s views, however one goes about it.
Cognitive biases arise from the structure of the human mind, which incorporates a long evolutionary past of the species and a more recent developmental path of the individual. At the species level, our ancestors survived because they responded effectively to immediate threats in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (an environment that no longer exists for the vast majority of human beings today). At the individual level, our younger self survived because we responded effectively to threats to our personal well being, but these learned reactions of childhood may not serve us well in adulthood.
When we come to full, reflexive self-consciousness as adults, and are capable of reflecting critically on our own evolutionary psychology as well as upon one’s own circumstances during one’s formative years, we may make an effort to change our behavior in the light of what we have learned. If we are willing to learn from our mistakes, and to recognize that our behavior has been less than optimal, we can make the attempt to catch ourselves before we make the same mistake again. This is difficult, because in order to do so we must fight both intuition and instinct, which tell us to go with our cognitive biases, even if they have ill-served us in the past. Being intimately linked to the will to live, cognitive biases almost always win in the end, but not necessarily or inevitably so.
Much of what I have written here about cognitive biases applies to patterns of thought and behavior that are distinctively human, but which are not opposed to our espoused principles, even when the behaviors and principles are both made explicit and brought to our attention. What are we to call these distinctively human biases that are not cognitive biases specifically, that is to say, not biases that violate standards of reasonableness that we have ourselves acknowledged? I know of no name for them, though they could be called “less than cognitive biases,” because what I have described might be considered more than a quirk or an eccentricity, but less than a cognitive bias. Perhaps we should call them human biases. Or perhaps we should use a familiar term and simply call them the human condition.
All our human institutions, our societies, our civilizations, no less than the shape and structure of our individual lives, emerge from these distinctively human biases that we sometimes call human nature. We could, then, make a distinction within human nature, recognizing a pathological portion of human nature that consists of true cognitive biases, and a benign portion of human nature that is distinctively human but which does not constitute a cognitive bias — a bias of a kind, but less than a cognitive bias — even if it steers us down particular paths of thought and behavior, as long as these paths do not conflict with our principles.
This would be a highly artificial approach to human nature, and perhaps even dishonest if it led us to deny as human nature those pathological aspects of ourselves that result in suboptimal outcomes, while recognizing only those benign aspects of human nature. To be charitable, one could call this an aspirational conception of human nature. Or, instead of making a distinction within the human condition, one could instead make a distinction among cognitive biases, recognizing pathological and benign cognitive bias, but allowing that all are cognitive biases of some kind or another.
Regardless of how we categorize distinctively human modes of thought that do not violate our expressed principles, we employ these distinctively human modes of thought every day in the ordinary business of life. Consider, for a moment, how much you learn from and about another person when you meet them and have even a brief conversation with them: assuming that you are fluent in the language spoken, you will come away with much more than what is sometimes called “propositional knowledge,” that is to say, discrete chunks of knowledge, like facts that can be understood in isolation from each other. Mostly what we learn in our interaction with the Other is what Michael Polanyi has called tacit knowledge.
In additional to the propositional knowledge communicated by the speaker, encoded in explicit language use, there are many obvious signs that are communicated without ever being made explicit, as, for example, a regional accent. Accents may reveal layers of personal history, and you may be able to tell from the sound of the other’s voice where they were born and the places that they lived subsequently (or where, or from whom, they learned to speak the language in question).
Distinctive figures of speech that place an individual within a particular geographical location or ethnic community, or which reveal their formative years to have occurred during a particular period of time, can be as obvious as accents. Similarly, cultural references both implicit and explicit will furnish clues as to the background of the speaker, or their pretensions to be identified in a certain way. We not only recognize this human overview as a whole, but we also recognize tensions within the whole that tell us much about the individual in question.
The emotional state of the speaker is usually so obvious that this may be clearer than the meaning of their utterances. Indeed, I have overheard many conversations in languages unknown to me in which I did not understand the words spoken, but the emotional content of which was unmistakable. But what we learn from the voice of the other is even much more subtle and detailed than this. The tone of voice used by each person in the conversation will express the social status that each believes they possess in relation to the other. If the voice is a familiar one, you will identify the speaker immediately, even if you cannot see the other. If the voice is not familiar, that, too, is something we understand and note.
If you know how to listen for it, voice stress is quite easy to identify in another’s voice. The rapidity with which the other speaks is often also quite revealing. More closely related to explicit propositional knowledge are word choice, grammar, and sentence structure, as well as response time to what you say (Are they distracted? Did they need to think about their response so as to formulate it in a palatable manner?) and the quality of the response you receive to comments and questions. If the other mentions events from the immediate past or what they intend to do next, this tells you about the structure of their day.
Just the sound of a voice alone (even over the imperfect connection of a telephone) reveals so much subtle information that remains on an implicit and intuitive level that it is difficult to sort it all out even if you try. But when you meet an individual face to face you also have a whole range of physical cues, the body language of the speaker as they speak, their gestures or lack of gestures, facial expressions or even an effort to suppress facial expressions (a “poker face”), eye movements, noticing what the other is looking at while they speak, facial twitching, and countless other cues that we mostly notice subconsciously and only with difficulty can make them explicit.
The knowledge that we typically derive from this human overview is likely to be called “intuition,” but really it should be credited to the subtlety of our perception and the long evolutionary history that we share with our fellow man, during which our ability to discern the thoughts of the other from their outward expressions, however cleverly concealed, was crucial to survival. Our evolutionary psychology has made us uniquely attuned to the subtleties of interacting with other human beings, and especially with human beings of our own race, with whom any given group of human beings shares a long and inevitably troubled history.
What we recognize in conversation with another human being, then, represents distinctively human modes of thought, because these modes of communication are deeply embedded in human cultural histories. These things are human because human beings have created them. Other animals with whom we share our homeworld, or other species on other worlds, may experience a similarly rich communicative exchange, in each case specific to the species in question. There may be, then, a class of epistemic modes that take a unique form in relation to each species that falls within this class.
That there are distinctively human modes of thought and behavior that are not demonstrably false or harmful should be of interest to us in the study of civilization in a cosmological context. If there are other civilizations in the universe, created by other sentient-intelligent beings, these other beings would not likely share what we call human nature and the human condition. I assume that there would be some overlap that would constitute the sentient condition or the intelligent condition, and this overlap would constitute the ground of another distinction: the distinction between human behaviors common to all sentient-intelligent beings (i.e., not represented elsewhere on Earth because we are the sole intelligent species on the planet, but represented anywhere that intelligence emerges), and distinctively human human behaviors that are not shared on the basis of shared sentience or shared intelligence (an idea I earlier considered in Non-Human Minds).
