Amerika

We can visualize almost all human thinking as variants on cause-effect logic. The worst malfunction confuses instance and essence, reading the instance (specific example) of something as generalized and universal. A related failing is effect-cause logic.

This relates mostly to categorical thinking. Confusing the instance and essence is the root of most mistaken categorical identifications; because this human has only one leg, for example, we assume that all humans are one-legged with a few mutants who have two legs.

Effect-cause logic says that because something has happened, it is the cause of itself, and thus we see poverty as the result of not having money (poverty is the cause of poverty) instead of looking at the behaviors that led to that state.

Similarly, we view the one-legged man as essentially single-legged, even if there are events that caused him to be missing a leg. Or we include things in the wrong category, like assuming that American citizenship papers make an American.

Much of our logic involves the “wet streets make rain” issue. We see that rain and wet streets correlate, so we assume the effect (wet streets) is the cause (makes rain), instead of the other way around, which is that rain — and other things — will make wet streets.

The only way to understand cause-effect reasoning is to have a map of the whole. For example, for the streets to get wet, water has to come from somewhere: a fire hose, a garden hose, rain, a flood. Without knowing the context, the data point and thus the category is meaningless.

Science has now found a handle on this by pointing out that knowing the length of the boards involved does not show us the shape of the ship, or in other words, effects cannot be causes because the overall design is the root to which causes are attached:

The finding resolves a long-standing question in geometry and highlights a deeper insight. Even with complete local information, a surface’s full shape cannot always be uniquely determined.

The root of cause-effect logic is this: the boards are the effect, and the design of the boat is the cause. Without the roadmap and blueprint, there is no necessary meaning to the boards, and if we encounter them, we have little idea what they make.

Humanity stumbles around looking at boards, saying “I have seen this make a go-kart before,” and then we hammer them into go-carts, never noticing that the go-kart barely works and creates a ton of problems when we use it.

Interestingly enough, one method to break out of our rigid means-over-ends thinking of this effect-cause confusion type is to add entropy to our brains so that they are aware of more possibilities than repetition:

They specifically aimed to measure a concept known as the entropic brain effect. In physics, entropy refers to the level of disorder or randomness in a system. When applied to the human mind, the entropic brain theory proposes that the psychedelic state creates a highly diverse and unconstrained pattern of brain activity.

When the brain falls into routine states, it confuses instance for essence. Whatever instance it first encounters, it takes to be essence and cause as well as categorical archetype, and therefore treats every similar thing as a variant of that.

For example, early on we encounter authority. This we come to dislike, and we see the authority as a category in itself, which leads us to confuse legitimate authority with self-serving authority, and because we do not draw the distinction, we sever our connection to something necessary.

In these situations, methodology rules over goals because we start avoiding methods on the basis of our categorical thinking. If we are scared by violence, we see all violence as bad, even wars that need to happen for us to move forward.

Our future thinking will involve asymmetrical reactions:

The researchers compare this behavior to two boats moving across a lake. Each boat creates waves that affect the other. Depending on their positions, these waves can push or pull the boats differently.

Only in the context of the whole framework can we see the relevance of any data point. We can assign categories by function, not appearance. We can distinguish cause from effect, essence from instance, and means from ends. Very few will do this because it is difficult.

However, much as the religious wars of the past changed our consciousness, our minds are changing again. We are moving into an age of function. In that age, we need to be able to understand cause-effect logic, which starts with freeing ourselves from effect-as-cause thinking.

Tags: asymmetry, cause-effect reversal, entropy, essence, instance, means over ends