I now seriously suspect that I don’t have free will. I can’t say I’ve given it much thought in the past – I’ve always viewed it as somewhat philosophical, somewhat theoretical, and the works of Schopenhauer and Hobbes don’t grip me as they should.
A lot of neuroscience, however, makes these questions more interesting, and more real. For example, we know that we have somewhat modular brains, and that only some parts of our brain create that consciousness that we all believe makes us. We also know that we’re subject to a multitude of biases, such as the awful confirmation bias.
I typically associate Jon, me, with my conscious self and this other brain machinery that “does stuff”. (Even defining self is difficult). But that brain machinery does stuff, interacts with my consciousness on occasion, and really, isn’t under my control.
I know I’m not the conscious source of my thoughts and actions. This is the bit that gets me. If I was the conscious source of my thoughts and actions, then that would imply that I think of them before I think of them. Well, I don’t. Neither do you. They just emerge.
In many ways, I’m an observer of my self. Where’s the free will in that?
I’m also not responsible for my brain structure. It’s the result of my history of interactions with the world – and I think this is a staggering thought. It started out in a way I had no control over (I didn’t control the genes that provided the basic structure of my brain, nor its growth characteristics). I had no control over the exposure of my growing brain to environment, to diet. I do now, to an extent, but it’s only a limited an extent – and of course, I’m already the result of all these causal chains. Over which I had no control.
So my brain and its current operation is the result of rich history of causal interactions over which I had no control. My beliefs are the product of prior causes over which I had no control. Where’s the free will in that?
What’s fascinating are some of the implications of dispensing with the notion of free will – how does that impact our notion of morality, retribution, politics, and in particular religion (many religions rely on free will not being an illusion). It’s mind blowing.
Well, I’ve just started down this road. Perhaps I’ll end up reading Schopenhauer after all? But to start off, here’s the talk (by Sam Harris) that got me all fired up, that covers all of these topics and more. Enjoy:
When I argue with someone, try and justify a belief or a moral, or try and convince myself to do something I know isn’t really great (it’s okay to eat that muffin – I went swimming this morning), I rationalise. It’s a terrible habit, probably innately human, yet it’s useful to at least be aware of when I’m doing it (or others are doing it) – as it usually conceals, hides or otherwise smuggles away truth.
Rationalising isn’t the same as being rational
I’m using the word rationalize in a very particular way here. Here’s the Oxford Dictionary definition:
attempt to explain or justify (one’s own or another’s behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate
It’s an interesting dictionary definition which captures the connotation of “even if these are not true or appropriate”.
Rational, on the other hand, is:
based on or in accordance with reason or logic
So being rational is doing like Spock does – taking the facts, the premises, and applying logic, moving us towards reasoned conclusions.
Rationalising is almost the opposite – and that’s what’s fascinating. You’re starting with a behaviour (me eating a muffin) and attempting to justify it with some plausible reasons (yeah, I exercised this morning).
Example: Morality, and art appreciation
There are a number if researchers investigating morality – how we reason about morality, come by our morals, how morality differs amongst cultures, what universal moral laws exist and so on. It’s fascinating stuff – and many now believe that we make moral judgements without recourse to reason. In other words, we judge whether some act is good or bad or permissible or forbidden based on some intuition, not conscious reasoning.
So it appears we make moral judgements without rational reason. But if you were asked about the judgment afterwards (“explain sir, why is it wrong to stab someone in self defence”), and given the time to think about a moral judgement, you would rationalise. It’s difficult to be entirely rational here – we don’t have a formal, consistent set of moral foundations.
I believe I read something similar about art appreciation. Intuitively we may like a piece of art. If asked afterwards why we like the piece, we rationalise – providing plausible reasons (oh, the colour is just lovely darling).
Rationalising and self-deception
Being rational starts with facts/premises and works to a conclusion, while rationalising sort of starts with the conclusion, and tries to find supporting premises.
In my experience, those supporting premises just have to be “good enough” for me to support some behaviour. I’m pulling the wool over my own eyes – which makes me think rationalising is a key part of self-deception.
A pet theory of mine is that when we create these supporting premises as part of rationalising, we do it in a way that maintains consistency with our view of the world. More on that in the future…
I’m sure I’ll never stop rationalising, but I wonder if it’s a useful exercise to recognise it a little more often than not – especially because those “plausible reasons” are not necessarily truth.
That’s why everyone wants to steal it. It’s your social network. Sure, a little dated – but still relevant. Who you SMS, who you email, who you call – it’s all in there.
Why though? I suspect it’s about who owns the relationships, the connections.
Take for example, Facebook. If you create an application that lets its users log in using Facebook, then the application can access the connections of the logged-in user.
You cannot use a user’s friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use, but you can use connections between users who have both connected to your application.
and
You may cache data you receive through use of the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date. This permission does not give you any rights to such data.
a user’s connections, which may not be copied or stored
Part of this is driven by privacy (a user cannot give permission on behalf of his connections). Part of it is driven by intellectual property. Facebook, LinkedIn and others have worked very hard at creating those social networks. They’re worth something.
Just like your address book, which sadly, doesn’t have any terms of use on it.
You are a conscious mind – you’re a self – aware of your own mind, and probably aware of other minds as well.
Underlying that construction of consciousness is a fascinating entanglement of biology and culture, which I’m slowly becoming aware of. For years I’ve gone around blithely thinking that I am me. It looks like it’s a little more complicated than that:
The fascinating books, Phantoms in the Brain (if you haven’t read it, do) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, really illustrate how much of our selves is a construction of our brain, and how even recognising your mother (or rather, associating another physical human with the mental representation you have of your mother) is a construct of the brain, and one that can be disrupted. Even in the absence of serious medical conditions – self is constructed, and dependent, on brain formation – and many medical conditions illustrate how very defining parts of what we call our selves are constructs in a reasonably modular brain system.
Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, presents some awesome meta study results of twins, separated twins, siblings and adopted siblings, demonstrating how much of a person’s personality (his “openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, antagonism-agreeableness, and neuroticism”) is heritable. A not-insubstantial part of your personality is right there in your genes. Parents like to think they play a substantial part in the defining of a child’s self. Their role, in a normal upbringing, is not that defining.
You’ve probably heard of parasites that change brain behaviour: the lancet fluke that induces ants to climb up stalks of grass so as to more easily get eaten by a cow, end up in faeces, bore through a snail and back into an ant. Or toxoplasmosis, which makes infected mice and rats less afraid of cat urine, and more likely to end up as a meal, and back in a cat. It turns out that toxoplasmosis can also affect the behaviour of humans. Drugs obviously do the same thing – but the notion of that reckless adrenaline-junky simply having some parasitic infection, feels a little more fascinating.
Mirror neurons are mind boggling, and are currently being examined as a basis of empathy, and a theory of mind. Which leads one to think of psychopaths, which may be seen as a mental disorder in which empathy is absent, which makes one think about neuroscience and justice – for if someone is mentally afflicted in such a way, are they “responsible” for their behaviour? Which leads to a great lot of thought about ethics and morality, and how many different cultures share many moral foundations instinctively (moral psychology is awesome). Mirror neurons, as part of our brain make-up, appear to go a long way to defining us and our empathy to others.
We appear to be entanglements of brain, genetics, our culture, and many more factors. Today, as I think about other people or myself, I’m also thinking about some of these fascinating topics that contribute to our understanding of what makes our selves, our minds, and what makes us conscious of our lives and those minds around us.
An Aside
Free will is another interesting issue related to all of these topics. Here’s a taster.
What if you could instrument activities in your life, analyse them, and learn from them? What if you socialised that data, or produced analysis centres which found patterns? I spent 30 minutes thinking about this after my internet connection went down, and came up with a bunch of questions.
The Instrumented Self
Instrument your heart. Go grab a heart rate monitor and wear it for a while. I wear one at the gym, but I’d like one I can wear all the time. What could I tell about myself? I strongly suspect there’s a good correlation between raised heart rate (at least over a few days) and my happiness.
Instrument your well being. Okay, happiness is a little more difficult to measure – so how about stress levels. Well, measure the the cortisol in your saliva (spitting every few hours) and you have a reasonably good indicator of stress. And why is that useful? Well, go read Robert Sapolsky’s excellent Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, or better yet, listen to a great lecture of his on the subject (#94 on iTunes here), and learn what stress does to you.
Instrument your calendar. Don’t just attend meetings. Measure the impact of those meetings. What’s the impact on your heart rate, or your stress? Wouldn’t that be interesting to know?
Instrument your walking. Okay, we all know how to do this with a nice little gadget, like the Fitbit say.
Instrument your bed. Your sleep, more specifically. Even an iPhone with Sleep Cycle can do that.
What else could we instrument?
How much garbage is generated in your house every day
How much petrol you use every month
How many emails you send every day
How many times you pick up your phone
How many times you switch between windows on your computer
There’s so much in our lives that can now be easily instrumented if we had the right tooling. But it strikes me that the instrumentation part is relatively easy. It’s easy to record our speech. It’s difficult to analyse it.
Easy Instrumentation
Ideally you want instrumentation to be easy and implicit. Using devices like a heart rate monitor, Fitbit and Sleep Cycle are mostly implicit. I don’t have to “do anything” for something to be measured.
The stress measurement is a little more difficult – I have no idea if someone can measure something like that a little less explicitly than hawking. It would be amazing if we could instrument eating. I suspect that’s a little difficult, but there already gadgets to instrument your faeces…
Change – Graphical, Daily, In Your Face
But we know we’re stressed – do we do anything about it? What if we knew it graphically, unambiguously? What if we instrumented ourselves and analysed that data? What if we got an email every day with interesting results? Would we act on that data?
I think some people will be encouraged to act – to change. Not everyone for sure – but if I knew that eating beans on Tuesday makes me feel good on Wednesday, well, I’ll eat more beans. Of course, people know that smoking is bad for them. What if the “bad” was measured? What if they saw a graph of continual degradation in lung capacity, distance walked and so on – and made “bad” more “real”?
What if that data was socialised? Perhaps between my close friends, or work colleagues? Would we act on the data then?
There’s a large psychological aspect to this – which would be fascinating. What’s the impact of all of this on behaviour, or how could we create a positive impact?
The Problem
What if we had the instrumented-self-as-a-service? Imagine vast numbers of instrumented humans feeding their data to a central service that drew even more interesting results.
Perhaps there’s a collective increase in well-being near the end of the month after the pay check arrives. Or perhaps the local store shutting down means that everyone in my neighbourhood now walks a little further to the nearest store?
We’ll need a little more than simple sentiment analysis to do this kind of analysis – and it sounds to me like this is one of the greatest problems with this idea.
The Naysayers
I think this is tremendously exciting and interesting – yet I can already hear the moaning naysayers. I had some of my DNA tested (using 23andMe) and tell people about it (usually quite excitedly) – yet I’m always surprised by the number of people who I meet who are totally and utterly aghast that I would do this.
After privacy, there major concern appears to be “what if I learned something bad”. They’re worried about learning something.
Side note: 23andMe learn things – they ask their users to answer small questionnaires. They’re learning more about correlations between genes and diseases & behaviour. Getting better the more people use them. There’s no reason something analysing our walking, eating, spending and defecating patterns couldn’t do the same.
How Are You?
We get asked this a lot. How are you? Well, what if I answered with a few graphs? What part of me are you really asking about? Sure, it’s usually phatic, but sometimes there’s real interest behind that question.
We lead these private lives (yet buy a tremendous amount on a credit card that is pretty well instrumented by financial institutions). Why is these data in their hands instead of ours? Why are large corporations changing the way shops sell based on our data – yet we don’t have access to it ourselves?
How are you? Imagine being able to answer this holistically. The health you – the mind you – the financial you – the …
The Quantified Self
I started thinking about this after knowledgeable friend Andy Hyde put me onto an interesting NPR podcast On the Media which had a pointer to a blog on The Quantified Self . “Self knowledge through numbers”. That’s a little cold – but that’s the heart of it.
Also check out this interesting TED talk by Deb Roy who analysed 90K hours of video to learn stuff about himself and his family. The techniques he used are powerful and implicit. (I had 4 tabs open to this stuff before my internet connection went down, so most of this has been written offline (a slow 3G) without referencing other material).
The Instrumented Self
Knowing more about my genotype has told me a little more about my phenotype. Sure, I am not just the result of my genes – there’s context too and more besides. That’s how I see the Instrumented Self. These data won’t tell us everything – but correlating multiple metrics will go a little way towards telling us something meaningful – and the more metrics we put in there, the more of us that we instrument – the more context and insight we could draw from this.
We should be actively engineering our social groups (thinking enterprise 2.0 here – social networks at work say) – to permit bearers of bad news by giving them a status that reinforces that their message is for the good of the group. At least, that’s my proposal. Here’s why.
Here are a few tenets of groups and being liked:
Overwhelmingly, we like to be liked. We like to be part of a group too.
You will be looked on more favourably by a group if you do something positive for that group. The opposite is true as well.
There is research to suggest that “the reluctance to transmit information is directly dependant on the inferred desirability of the message for the potential recipient.” See the MUM effect for more on this quote and the effect.
Association with a positive or negative message/event is enough – you don’t actually have to be/do the positive message/event – you simply need to be associated with it. This is why many folk pay good money for those Super Bowl adverts. The watchers are having a great, memorable, positive experience. Simply watching an ad in the midst of that positive experience is good enough for you to feel more positive about that brand (in general). In its negative form, “Don’t shoot the messenger” and all that.
One further tenet here is that I’m working on the premise that a group would be stronger if they absorbed some piece of bad news and treated it as positive – as another element of the puzzle to solve, not as a hurdle.
Here’s an example: You’re in a group of wine tasters on a business network. They’re your peers – you go around tasting and rating wines – and work for the same business – a highly competitive one that isn’t doing too well. You’ve just discovered some research that indicates that most of your fellow wine tasters are pretty bad – they don’t have the genes for tasting bitter (they’ve got, (like me – 80% chance), the CC genotype of the TAS2R38 gene). Do you share this on the network, or do you rather tell your good friend, one of the other tasters?
Proposition:
Many social networks among peer groups, colleagues, businesses will automatically create a culture in which bad news is suppressed.
In other words, people will tip-toe around the bad news, phrase it in a weak positive light, or rather share it with their close friends than the group itself.
But creating that kind of social feeling (this is bad news but hey, it’s for the greater good) is pretty hard. By default we aren’t wired that way – by default we want the group to feel good about us. After all, my colleagues are in the group, my boss, and so on (or my family, my friends, and so on – depending on context). So by default, the reluctance to share this information is going to lead to a suppression.
What I’m suggesting is that we solve this by providing some kind of official title, a positive status symbol, to bearers of bad news – make it expected that they yield bad news. This might counteract some of the ill will I will harbour for that bearer.
Or perhaps have an anonymising “bad news bot” that posts the bad news on behalf of someone.
To learn more about social gaming and the game mechanics used, a group of us got together and played CityVille for a while. Besides the social/gaming aspects of these games, something else struck me: the similarity between virtual currency in these games, and reward programs such as Air Miles. Here’s my theory: Air Miles is a Virtual Currency – it’s only the context that differs.
Air Miles as a Reward Program
So Air Miles is a reward program. I buy more flights with BA (say), and I get more air miles from BA that I can put towards decreasing the cost of another flight. The more I fly, the more air miles are rewarded to me, the more I save on another flight.
Virtual Goods
Virtual goods are often considered as “non-physical objects” with no intrinsic value. I’m not quite sure that definition will continue to hold. More and more these goods will hold real value – but no matter.
Virtual Currency
I need a currency with which to purchase virtual goods – and folk call this a virtual currency. Again, I think this definition will not stand the test of time. Think of the real monetary value attached to virtual land in Second Life for example. These virtual goods are not without intrinsic value.
Getting back to the theory: In CityVille, I can earn two types of virtual currency:
Coins are easily generated within the game – if you play reasonably well, you’ll get a reasonable supply of coins with which you can buy a host of virtual goods. Of course, I can use real-world money to buy Coins too. That saves me time. Time is money, literally.
Cash is not so easily generated – and some virtual goods require Cash. To be competitive, I would guess folk would have to buy Cash with real money.
The point though is that I have to probably exchange real money to get virtual money to buy virtual goods.
A Parallel: Air Miles is a Virtual Currency
So here’s a theory: Air Miles is a Virtual Currency.
I can earn air miles/virtual currency by “playing the game” – this is obvious on CityVille. I think it’s not a stretch of the imagination to consider buying and flying on British Airways as a game.
I can buy air miles/virtual currency with real money. One can buy Zynga Cash, and one can buy Air Miles.
I can spend air miles/virtual currency to increase my enjoyment/satisfaction/gifting/status.
Context is the Name of the Game
The only difference is context. Every game has a context. The context of CityVille is almost exclusively constrained to the virtual game. Not completely – and surely this will change. Big brands are going to move into these games, and we’re going to see a virtual/real world exchange that’s just not there yet on CityVille.
The context of Air Miles is constrained as well – I have a set of ways in which I can earn air miles (using a particular credit card, shopping at a particular shop, flying a particular air line) and spend it in particular ways (travel, primarily).
I believe we need to think of all of these things holistically. Just because one virtual currency is on a computer screen and lets me buy something somewhat more intangible than a cruise to Barbados, doesn’t mean that it’s fundamentally different.
Side Note: Air Miles Doing Better
If you think of other reward programs (American Express and other credit cards, your shopping reward card from Tesco or Sainsburys or wherever, etc.) as games in different contexts, with virtual currencies, then it begs the question: why are so many of them so bad.
Zynga has a staggering number of users. Staggering. Why? Not because the core game is amazing and delightful. It’s not – it’s reasonably simple. But what it does have are some great game mechanics, the social ones in particular.
Why doesn’t Air Miles have a strong social aspect? Why can’t they? Aren’t they losing out big time. It’s going to come – it’s just a matter of time. When it does, we’re going to see a delightful cross-pollination. You can now buy virtual goods in Zynga’s games with American Express rewards for example.
What’s missing is the injection of the social aspects into the credit cards, air miles and other reward schemes.
