MIND READERS DICTIONARY : Mind Readers Dictionary

An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?"

All of the above, but on the second question, yes I am a man with a mission. I am a missionary. I'm trying to put a leash on those Godawful narrow-minded right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Partying, manipulative tricks we all use, me included.

Before my current missionary work, I was your basic idealistic left wing activist moving from issue to issue looking for leverage. I lived for six years on The Farm, the world’s largest hippie commune whose mission statement was “We’re out to save the world.” I ran water development projects for villages in Guatemala. I researched and wrote for Food First and Ashoka Foundation, Fecundity Fund and GBS Foundation. I co-founded 20/20 Vision, a D.C. based peace/environmental organization that lasted for 28 years. I ran the public affairs department for The Body Shop International, invited by its legendary environmentalist founder, Anita Roddick to help “radicalize the company.” I designed political campaigns for Ben and Jerry’s. I was on a mission.

Throughout my 20-year first career as an activist, I had a sense that progressivism would just keep on progressing. Sure there would be bumps in the road, but the overwhelming trend would be toward less dogma and more pragmatism, less fear-mongering and more freedom, less waste and more efficient resource management.

In my naiveté, I thought the US was free and clear from the lure of fascism, and I didn’t foresee the Republican Party becoming the sneering, ranting know-it-all crazy uncle who won’t stop bullying folks into submission at the family dinner.

I didn’t foresee that while he ranted, rallying the nation’s natural-born ranters to his side, the family’s goose would be cooked. In the 80’s there were a few big causes. Now there are so many it is hard to know where to the leverage is.

But I know where. I’m a man with a mission at home and abroad, a mission that pertains as much to our daily personal interactions as our global negotiations, a mission to curb a tendency not just in Republicans, but in all of us. Of all the problems we face, here’s the biggest:

We humans tend to translate "ouch" into "you're bad," "I want" into "you owe me," "I'm uncomfortable" into "It's all your fault,” “I’m disappointed” into “You’re evil.” In hundreds of ways, specific and vague, forceful and gentle we instantly, automatically, sanctimoniously, self-servingly, and selectively summon moral principles to support our personal preferences.

There’s no reason to expect us to be any different. We’re all born as babies and babies have to whine to get attention. For newborns, crying is survival. And there’s no reason to assume that, just by growing up into our meager human power of reason, whining would disappear.

We are what you’d get when you cross strong feelings with modest powers of abstract reasoning. You’d get abstract reasoning tripping all over itself in a desperate lurch to support our strong feelings.

The Republican Party didn’t start out as the “Always Right” Wing. Buried in the party’s history are a few laudably well-reasoned and substantive principles. Chief among them was a strong commitment to the rational design of a well functioning Republic, a hierarchical hybrid form of government in which individuals, states and the country as a whole share power.

Ironically, Edmund Burke, the father of conservativism was on a mission like mine. In reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution he argued that abstract ideas and political theories are dangerously likely to be ill-conceived and self-serving and therefore rarely better guides to the design of governments than the weather-tested syste

The older we get the harder it is to start new lasting romantic relationships. I can explain it by way of an old joke, a fundamental principle, and a new parable.

An old joke:

A little girl, sitting on her grandpa's lap asked "Did God make me?"

"Yes," said her grandpa.

"And did God make you too?" she asked.

"Yes," said her Grandpa.

She reflected and said, "He's getting better isn't he?"

A fundamental principle:

In living systems, attachments and dependencies grow. The longer you’ve lived in your community the harder it is to leave.  The longer a creature has been domesticated the harder it is to be released into the wild, the longer you’ve had a cell phone, the harder it is to do without it, the longer you've had a habit, the harder it is to break, and the longer you have been married the more complex your divorce settlement is likely to be. The challenge to long term relationships is not finding the raison d’etre (the function, the reason to be or stay) but the raison d’entre (the reason to enter in the first place).

A new parable:

God was experimenting.  She had made many fine creatures. Her first were fully programmed at birth.  They were like robots.  She made large numbers of them because, being preprogrammed, they couldn’t adapt.  If they wandered into an environment where their programmed behavior didn’t work, they would die. As long as there were lots of them though, that wasn’t a problem.

Her next creatures could learn by trial and error. If they had a close call with something deadly they could learn to avoid that danger in the future.  They could only learn from close calls--near death, not real death experiences--but that made them a lot more adaptable to changes in their environments.   These did well. God was getting better, and more daring too.

God decided to see what would happen if he made one with hindsight, foresight and sidesight, the ability to imagine back into the past, forward into the future and really anything on any side, and from any side. It wasn’t just that they could imagine anything. They could sew all of their imaginings together into one big overview of God’s works, really a glimpse of what God herself saw.  This overview would make the creature highly adaptive, able to anticipate danger not just from near death experiences but from weaving all sorts of twos and twos together.

For the second time ever--God being the first time--there was a creature that could ask and answer the question “what’s this all about?”

The trouble was that there was plenty of danger, behind, in front and on all sides. Being able to see so much at once is not for the faint of heart. God could handle it but that’s because she was above it.  She was the one who set up the game of life this way originally, with things falling apart, and life resisting falling apart but only for a while, a competition in which each creature is both an individual trying to survive in a dangerous environment and the dangerous environment to other creatures.

These new ones were creatures who could remember terrible things that had happened to them.  They could foresee their own deaths. They could see threats on every side of them.  It made them anxious, clingy, quirky and even a little more dangerous than the other creatures.

It’s true, God’s new breed were better at adapting. They were good at figuring out what was dangerous and steering clear. Indeed, so clear, that they weren’t very good at mating. Their foresight enabled them to anticipate trouble with their fellow anxious quirky creatures. Their hindsight made them remember dating troubles past.  Instinctively they were drawn to each other, but then their imaginings made them shy away.

So God started playing around with the variables.  She invented some painkilling, bliss-wakening drugs that would fi

My life is so completely cushy that I can afford to visit distressing thoughts and scenarios. I can watch a movie like Slumdog Millionaire and feel empathy from my safe vantage point. I can even find the ending a little hokey. I'm betting that it wouldn't be so easy if I were suffering more. People with stressful lives would tend to find the beginning more painful and the ending more compelling. When grieving the end of my marriage, I suddenly lost my appetite for bravely honest movies about divorce. I was getting enough of a reality check from reality, thank you. For some folks the grief and stress never ends.

I am also keenly interested in the scientific pursuit of ever more accurate stories about how things work. I don’t think I would have nearly the appetite for accuracy if I needed to counter a more miserable existence with more comforting, reassuring, affirming stories. The lure of wishful thinking is, in part a function of what you’re up against. The more pain you’re in, the more wishful thinking you’ll naturally want and need.

For those of us with relatively cushy lives then, it’s no good telling those with difficult lives that they ought to face reality. In this often cruel and always unfair world everyone deserves to tell whatever stories give them comfort enough to get by. We could call it The Right to Believe.

It’s also no good to have wishful thinking imposed on the scientific pursuit of accurate stories. We could call it The Need to Know. People should be free to believe whatever wishful stories get them through the night, but science should be free to pursue whatever accurate stories will get us through the crises. Climate change, extinctions, epidemics, cancer—the conflict between the right to believe and the need to know isn’t some intellectual debate, it’s a hot war, so let me word it more directly:

From science to belief: We honor your right to believe whatever comforts you, but get it the hell out of the way of science, because even unimpeded, science can hardly keep up, and only if it keeps up will it save our children, even your children, oh wishful thinker.

From belief to science: You scientists caused most of those crises in the first place and how dare you say your method gets at truth better than other methods? Why are you qualified to make that claim? Because you’ve decided you’re right? Do you know how many wishful thinkers say exactly the same thing? What makes you think science is so special that we all have to get out of your way?

As pretentious as it sounds, science can make special claims. The universe either complies with or defies our beliefs. Reality pushes back. As Aldous Huxley said, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” The universe simply complies more with scientific accounts.

Imagine parallel annual reports from two human ventures, one for science and one for, say, religion. Or imagine centennial or millennial reports. No matter what period you measure, science’s report would be vastly thicker. No matter what opinions we might hold on the subject, our intuitions recognize that science is winning the accuracy game. So no, it’s not just like any other way of believing. Even the people who claim that science and wishful thinking are indistinguishable intuit this. Their argument undermines itself and reveals deference to science. They are trying to make a compelling objective case that there is no way to make a compelling objective case.

This backhanded, reluctant deference to science is understandable. We may grumble about sciences’ pretentiousness, especially when science disappoints our wishful thinking, but at least tacit deference to science is all-pervasive and not arbitrary. When religious fundamentalists need results, they rely on doctors and engineers rather than faith healers or prayers.

"Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and literature; it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second -- the story of our quest for love from the world -- is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important, or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here, too."

Alain de Botton "Status Anxiety."

To be loved by the world--what could that mean? I think it's a sense of inner and outer harmony, relief from dissonance within yourself and dissonance between yourself and the outside world. It's a sense that you can both be yourself and be successful by the world's standards. Being loved by the world doesn't have to mean being adored by the world, but still somehow affirmed, or as the biologist Stuart Kauffman put it, a feeling that you are "at home in the universe."

This affirmation is not just the thought or realization, "Hey, I'm at home." It's a feeling. I'd go so far as to say it's the feeling of being well adapted--surmisal of the fittest--a sense, even a false one, that you fit your circumstances. In that respect it's a direct extension of what organisms have been evolving toward for over 3.5 billion years.

Still, surmisal of the fittest is not just about biological fitness despite what evolutionary psychologists tend to imply. No, it's surmisal of the fittest by whatever standards of fitness have emotional resonance for us these days, not all of which are directly or indirectly in the service of biological reproductive success. Think of how much human behavior is driven by a desire to feel like you're a good person on the side of righteousness, a person with integrity fighting for greater integrity in the world around. That feeling may have nothing to do with having children who survive and reproduce. It can be uncorrelated to the biological urge and can even work at cross-purposes to it, for example in a suicide bomber who dies childless feeling that he has acted with supreme integrity in perfect service of what is truest in the universe.

Feeling fitted has both the inner and outer quality--integrated within and integrated with your outside circumstances. The inner feeling is relief from dissonance or doubt, a sense that who you are--your preferences, intentions, and values hold together with simple clarity. This internal consistency is what in the world of the intellect is called coherence. But with feelings it's not necessarily a drive to have a coherent intellect. The coherence that makes us feel loved by the world is just the gut's satisfied feeling of relief when ambivalence, confusion and inner conflict has lifted. Indeed, emotional coherence might be achieved at the expense of intellectual coherence. For example George Bush who many of us found intellectually incoherent felt that he was a man of exceptional integrity. And indeed for most of us, most of the time the feeling of being right takes priority over actually being right. Emotional coherence often trumps intellectual coherence.

The feeling of freedom from conflict with your outer circumstances is like what in the world of the intellect we call correspondence. Correspondence is having your theories match sense data and experiential evidence. If I said "eggs don't break when you drop them from second story windows," you would say that lacks correspondence to the audiovisual sense data that comes with the splatting crunching sight and sound of eggs dropped from windows. Again thoug

Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary.

I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but every aspect of life. I watch myself and everyone I know wrestle with the tension between open and closed, romance and skepticism, faith and reason, confidence and doubt, tenderness and protectiveness, hope and fear, transcendence and realism, generosity and caution, friendship and business.

I don't see any way out of it. I think this kind of tension is the truest fundamental, a fundamental that, alas, isn't a groove you can slide and cozy your way into, but a groove that's a rickety rope bridge we weave as we walk it.

How can it not be? Ours is to enjoy life with death in full view.

The tension plays out in every arena and at every scale or scope, from how we cope with keeping a spring in our step as we stumble over the day's little obstacles to how we enjoy the world we've created even as it becomes clear that it is creating terrifying climate change. How do you enjoy life when you know the risks? Through a mixture of liberating pleasure and compromising caution.

So no, my column isn't just about romantic partnership. But still, that kind of love is a great and practical place to explore this tension. "To love that well, that thou must leave ere long" as Shakespeare put it. Courtship is a microcosm in which we experience a particularly vivid version of the open/closed question that all of life addresses. To survive, organisms' bodies have to answer correctly such questions as Should I join this? Should I stay with this? Should I be open to this? Can I trust this? Am I safe here? And these too, on a different scale are the questions we deal with in courtship.

The paradox of life is that it consists of independent individuals that, to survive have to be open, sacrificing some of their individuality. From the simplest single cell organism to the most complex society, sustainability depends on having the right semi-permeable membrane, one that lets in what is good and keeps out what is bad, joins the right partnerships and not the wrong ones. That's what all of life seeks, through some combination of trial and error, biological mechanism, instinct, responsiveness, emotion and in us--the very rarest of cases--through conscious cognitive choice.

Lately I've noticed that there are really two types of ambigamists and that I much prefer the company of one of them--the ironic ambigamist--so much so that I'll describe the other as bipolar.

Both ironic and bipolar ambigamists oscillate between open and closed, romance and skepticism. But ironic ambigamists never forget that the tension between those two is the truest fundamental. No matter how open or closed they feel in any moment they know and embrace the opposite condition. They own both their openness and closed-ness, even while they're feeling more one way than the other.

For ironic ambigamists, the dream partner is someone with whom they can merge their ambivalence. Their partnership is one in which each partner winkingly recognizes that the other is an appropriately skeptical individual, even while both parties do what they can to keep the romance, or at minimum the appearance of safe, certain, romance strong and alive. They joke about life on that edge between being one thing and two, a couple and individuals. They give each other room to breath and forgive each other the disconnects when one is closed and the other is open. In other words they respect the inescapable give and take of partnership.

In contrast, bipolar ambigamists, when feeling open can't remember feeling closed, and when feeling closed, can't remember feeling open. So yes they oscillate like any ambigamist, but no, they don't take responsibility for it. If you're feeling romanti

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My writing drives some people crazy because I make big jumps from one topic to another. One minute I'm talking romance, the next I'm talking the origins of life. I aim to edit for smooth transitions but there's a bigger problem than prose styling.

I've invested decades in research that trains my mind to follow abstract patterns. I'm doing what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson described as solving for patterns. The details become background; the abstract patterns become foreground. In this article for example, I'll make a connection between love, unemployment, genetics and our changing attitudes about God. Some readers will think I'm comparing apples to oranges to shoelaces but there is method to my madness or at least my colleagues and I think so. You decide for yourself.

Abstraction has a bad reputation. I remember once early in this work I described it to a real estate developer friend. He said "sounds very abstract" and I assumed he was being critical. He said no, he meant it positively because "there's nothing so practical as a good abstraction."

Pursuit of practical abstractions has a long history. Take the 2,500 year old Tao Te Ching, which Alan Watts once described as an attempt "to know the patterns, structures, and trends of human and natural affairs so well that one uses the least amount of energy dealing with them." In other words, if you recognize patterns with greater accuracy, you make fewer mistakes, which frees you to enjoy life more.

Solving for pattern is itself enjoyable. Familiarity with the abstract patterns can make your life more like art, a microcosm for the cosmic. Art exposes the abstract patterns that show up across arenas. Think of the way we savor the calligraphy of music or the metaphors in poetry and fiction. They satisfy a natural human desire for what I'll call pattern sensuality.

As a pattern sensualist cultivating pattern fluency, I get to read my life like good fiction. No matter whether I'm winning or losing, hurting or happy, I'm always harvesting abstract insights into the patterns and structures of human and natural affairs.

A friend claims I saved her career once by drawing cosmic parallels. She's an intellectual property lawyer and about ten years ago was thinking about quitting because the work was so dry and soulless. I laid out the ways her work addressed one of the meatiest toughest judgment calls in all of life, the question of when to be open. I drew parallels between her work and central themes in evolutionary biology, romance, politics, friendship and warfare. The conversation inspired her. She thanks me to this day.

Indeed, here's a Christmas gift offer from me to you. If you find yourself feeling flat about your career, I'd do the same for you. Just respond here with a short description of your work and I'll write you back something about its relevance to profound abstract patterns. I've long wanted to write a series of books on the meaning of life as revealed through different career paths. Accounting as a source of general wisdom--that sort of thing.

Still, I don't let my friend's gratitude go to my head. That's because of the pattern I want to talk about today. My cosmic re-description of her law work may have helped her stick with it for a few months at most, but I've watched her over the years and her commitment is less about the meaning of her work than the immediate incentive structure built into her daily interactions. People expect things of her that she succesfully delivers. She is like a reciprocating engine. She produces; clients demand more; she produces; clients demand more. She may occasionally wake up to doubts about her work, but by the time she gets to work, she's just in it. As with all of us her self-motivation is less a p

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Meg, a single woman in San Francisco had her habits and routines. She did yoga after work pretty much every day. Some nights she got together with friends; other nights she stayed home and watched DVDs or read.

Her friends introduced her to Mark, a single guy from Oakland about ten miles away. Like Meg he enjoyed spending some nights out, but he insisted on practicing guitar every night.

They dated and time together felt good.  They liked being out as a couple among friends.  They liked cuddling at one or the other’s apartment watching DVDs or reading.  When one was feeling down the other was usually up so they balanced each other’s spirits nicely. Each felt stronger with the other.

Now they’ve been together about four years. Mark moved into Meg’s place and now pays half the rent. They have a new dog, Beano. They never wonder whether they belong together, but of course there are incompatibilities.  Meg likes Mark’s guitar playing, but sometimes they stay home so he can practice when she would rather go out. Mark is glad Meg is so fit but sort of wishes she didn’t insist on going to yoga after work because it means he has to come home right away to walk Beano.  “Love takes work,” Mark says, “but it’s worth it.”

Freud said “Love and work…work and love, that's all there is…love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles said that love and strife were the primary moving factors not just for humans but also for the whole universe.

I’m single again and dating, thinking about what it takes to make a couple. And I’m also still part of a research team working on the emergence of life from non-life (the field is simply called “emergence.”).

Between these two activities I find myself agreeing with Freud and Empedocles.   Love and work are the cornerstones of humanness but they’re universal too.  If you’ll work with me, I think I can explain the connection.

Things, living and otherwise have their habits, the behaviors they spontaneously produce. A billiard ball on a table will just keep sitting there.  A ball rolling down an incline will keep rolling.  As singles, Meg does yoga after work; Mark practices guitar at night. Those are their habits independent of new outside influences. In Meg and Mark’s case we’d say they do those things because they love them.

In our emergence research we’re calling this “orthograde” behavior.  Ortho- means straight and -grade means incline. It’s what things are inclined to do if they do what is normal or “straight” for them.  Orthograde behavior is spontaneous or internally-generated behavior.

Things with different spontaneous habits or orthogrades come into contact.  The rolling ball hits the stationary ball. Meg and Mark meet and move in with each other.

In interaction the balls change each other’s behavior.  The formerly-stationary ball moves; the rolling ball’s path changes.  Likewise, when Meg and Mark move in together, they change each other’s behavior too.  Behavior under a new influence is called “non-spontaneous.”  It’s not that it’s un-natural.  After all, interaction is natural.  But it’s non-spontaneous with respect to what the balls or people did before interaction.

We emergentists call the interaction between two orthogrades a “contragrade.” Contra-, of course means against. Contragrade interactions change behavior. In fact, that’s the physical science definition of work. Work shifts behavior from spontaneous to non-spontaneous, from what things would do on their own to what they do under each other’s influences.

If, one morning you noticed that your parked car had a new dent in it, you would not think that the car had

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A Holiday gift for someone thoughtful in your life? Consider the New York Times Best-selling graphic novel Logicomix. It's a beautiful story about the death of the 2,400-year-old dream of creating a system of logic that wasn’t founded on the shaky ground of intuitive assumptions. The central character is Bertrand Russell. Though he failed, his Herculean effort did contribute to the invention of the computer.

It also led to mathematician Kurt Godel’s major revelation: It wasn’t just Bertie’s logic system that failed. No matter how they’re built, any and all systems of logic will be built on shaky unprovable intuitions. In other words, it is possible to build great sturdy towers of thought, but they’ll all have loose foundations.

The philosopher Richard Rorty applies this to everyday life. If some smart alec responded to every assertion you made by asking “yes, but why?”, within the limits of your patience you could reason your way to answers:

Why do you work?

Because that’s how I earn a living.

Why do you earn a living?

Because that’s how I pay for the things I need and want.

And why do you pay for the things you need and want?

Because it’s good to have them.

And why is it good to have them?

...

At some point you would be unable to explain. Your response would be tautological, in other words circular, where the answer is just a restatement of the question: “It’s good because it’s good!”

Rorty calls this your “final vocabulary.” At the edge of your powers of explanation, you’ve got no logical traction. What you say is unfounded and yet final. All you can say is, “It just is.”

With Godel’s discovery of logic’s limits, a final vocabulary isn’t optional. We all have one. Every great scientific theory has one.

Our thoughts and conversations are thus like explorations around an expanse of blacktop surrounded on all sides by sand. We have traction up to the edge, but if we go over our wheels spin.

In this context, a debate can become like a game of chicken, with two people trying to drive each other off the edge. The smart alec asks question after question until you fall onto your final vocabulary. She can then say, “Look at you. You’re a joke. You believe things without a strong foundation. You’re making assumptions!”

Socrates is remembered as a humble, inquiring man but he famously confronted self-certain Athenians with their own final vocabularies. By question alone he drove his fellow citizens into the sand.

A few of his students became infamous smart alecs. By imitating Socrates, they made others look dumber and themselves look smarter. Two ended up with so much confidence in their own assumptions they became tyrants.

Socrates himself meant well. He believed that with more inquiry comes more careful thought. Inquiry is how you build out the blacktop to where you have traction everywhere in all directions. When I say that the dream of building a system of logic not founded on shaky ground is 2,400 year-old, I’m dating it to Socrates.

And now that dream is dead.

But the smart alec isn’t. Plenty of people still use what I’ll call the ad laxus (against the looseness) fallacy: It’s the smart alec’s fallacious assumption that because she can drive you into your own traction-less final vocabulary, her own reasoning must be solid.

You’ve got to watch out for that. Don’t let anyone take you down saying, “You don’t know that for sure.” No one knows anything for sure.

And as with all fallacies, this one has an opposite: Just because nothing can be known for sure, it doesn’t necessarily mean your assumptions are as good as hers. In my next article I’ll suggest a way of thinking about how to evaluate ideas