Skip to main content

Why We Don't Need Perfect Understanding to Make Good Decisions

 

I have written previously about "bounded rationality," a behavioral economics concept that says people's decision-making is not as logical as they might believe. I have also written about various ways that we can improve our decisions, whether that's through the scientific method, the legal process, or peer review. Some of these strategies rely just as much on the Intuitive Mind as on the Narrative Mind, and other strategies like Gary Klein's Naturalistic Decision Making or the actions triggered by situational awareness are even more Intuitive. This week, I'd like to examine the idea that even the more rational strategies don't need to be strictly true in order to help us succeed.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant described a difference between phenomena, which are the things we experience, and noumena, which is the underlying reality that generates phenomena. Unfortunately, we have no way to connect with that underlying reality. Everything we might see, touch, evaluate, or scientifically measure is still part of our experience of the world -- in other words, just another example of phenomena. Noumena remain forever mysterious. This position is called transcendental idealism, because it doesn't deny that there really is a world around us; it just insists that anything we see or believe about that world is mediated through our ideas about it.

Now, it's probably true that the world around us is made up of physical "stuff" that we can see and touch. At some level, of course, physics tells us that even that "stuff" is really made up of particles and electromagnetic fields, with objects' mass being just the interaction between fundamental particles and a field produced by the Higgs boson. But Kant's view means that it's equally possible that our standard materialist understanding is wrong. Some alternatives might be that we are living in a computer simulation (as proposed by David Chalmers), or that reality is a mathematical model corresponding to the tones sung by immaterial angels (a non-physical "Turing machine" that could simulate events just as well as a computer does, proposed by Eric Schwitzgebel). Reality, in other words, has some underlying structure that produces the things that we believe we experience. The nature of that reality, though, could be many different things.

Alvin Plantinga and CS Lewis both argued that rational thinking should not be trusted if it evolved through random processes, and turned that argument around as a proof for the existence of God. On the other hand, Paul Churchland argues that our Narrative Minds are evolutionarily selected on the basis of what helps us to survive; Daniel Dennett extended that argument to suggest that because a true representation of reality is likely to be more adaptive than a false one, evolution is actually selecting for truth. I don't think that either of these arguments is highly convincing: Churchland's intermediate position about adaptive functioning is the simplest explanation for why logic generally produces good results. 

The Narrative Mind doesn't need to be accurate all the time in order to still be useful to us in predicting events. In particular, it isn't necessary for the Narrative Mind to have any access to Kant's level of noumena, only to predict relationships between events. We also have access to the Intuitive Mind, which doesn't even pretend to be accurate, but it is still often useful in producing insights that the Narrative Mind cannot.

The true nature of the world may always remain unknowable to us. We can still, however, be very successful in navigating it with the help of our two complementary ways of understanding.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Years of Anxiety Taught Me About Balancing Two Minds

  Guest post by Dr. Britt Ritchie, DNP, PMHNP-BC   First, a huge thank-you to Dr. Paul Cook for inviting me to contribute here. Paul was my Division Chair when I worked at the University of Colorado (CU) as an assistant professor. During that time, he saw me at one of my most vulnerable points—grappling with anxiety so intense it almost made me abruptly quit my job. I knew it was social anxiety—the kind of fear marked by an overwhelming sense of being judged, embarrassed, or humiliated in front of others—but knowing the label didn’t make it any easier to manage in the moment. Because of that shared history, it feels especially fitting to write about my experience lecturing during my time at CU through the lens of Paul’s Two Minds Theory. I can still picture the lecture hall—the rows of students, the humming projector, the fluorescent lights that were both too hot and too bright. On paper, I was prepared. I had spent hours rehearsing, editing slides, and reviewing notes. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Self-Determination Theory Through the Lens of Two Minds

  Self-determination theory  (SDT) is a framework for understanding human motivation. It gained a great deal of popularity as a possible explanation for the effects of motivational interviewing  (MI), although MI's primary creator William Miller has said that his understanding of MI is atheoretical . It is certainly the case that MI came about long before SDT was used to explain it. And it's also true that SDT was an established model with its own body of research before it was ever linked to MI. But Stephen Rollnick, Miller's co-author in his most important works on MI, has specifically said that he considers SDT to provide the theoretical explanation for MI's success. Deci and Ryan (2000) propose six "mini-theories" or propositions that together make up SDT: 1. intrinsic motivation  is a strong predictor of behavior, and is related to feelings of competence and autonomy. The intrinsic/extrinsic motivation distinction is an old one in psychology, reflecting ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is AI Out to Get Us?

 I wrote earlier this year about a disturbing report on the prospects of self-improving artificial intelligence (AI) models deciding to take over the world. Much of the fear around AI relates to something called the "alignment problem," which simply means that an AI model might have goals incompatible with human flourishing -- or in some dystopian scenarios, with human life itself. A classic example of this line of thought is the "paper clip problem," in which a superintelligent AI is tasked with making paper clips. Eventually every resource in the world -- including human beings -- becomes just another obstacle for it to overcome in its goal of transforming the entire universe into paper clips. So far, that's not the danger -- AI models don't have that level of direct control over the physical world (yet). But a couple of new developments in the past few months do  suggest that AI models are pursuing goals different from what their human designers might w...
Post a Comment
Read more