Philosophy

Improving Moral Thinking

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[Apologies for the long post. My next on this topic will be much shorter.]

Perhaps the most woefully neglected aspect of our thinking trouble is our moral thinking. Most often we begin thinking about the morality of an issue with our minds already made up.  Our gut may have decided on the issue instantly.  Your boss may have already told you that the project is good, and that if you do not see it that way, you can look for employment elsewhere.  As Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Of course, most believe ourselves moral—even some professional criminals claim to follow a code. Some instinctual thinkers follow their hearts, making moral choices based on sympathy or disgust. Some follow the crowd, believing that their church provides sufficient moral guidance, that the path they were taught years ago is righteous, and even that everyone should follow that path as they assume the beliefs of others are wrong. Rational thinkers learned that rational, self-interested choices benefit society optimally and that all problems have rational solutions. A few believe that their worldview justifies acts that others believe are abominations.

All of those folks are wrong, at least in part. It is not moral to pick and choose which rules to follow, according to your convenience. Instincts are often deeply biased and can result in ugly vigilantism. While many religious traditions are filled with valuable moral lessons, blindly following one faith while denying all others has resulted in centuries of bloody religious wars. Rational government scientists conducted an unethical experiment for 40 years until 1972, and rational pursuit of profit has caused pollution killing many humans and other species. Any act of terror is unfair to the innocent victims, and as a rule they do not achieve any positive goal.

Many lazy, soft-headed ‘thinkers’ have given up on moral thinking, using excuses that there are no universally agreed upon moral facts and that all morality is relative. Some self-serving cynics use these excuses as permission to do whatever they want, consequences be damned. Nonsense. I already presented an incontrovertible moral baseline for humanity, the side of life, and next I explained it’s logical corollary, that life requires diversity and that the purpose of knowledge is to pursue the same universal moral objective to further life. This simple moral framework, based on the Golden Rule, makes many moral choices obvious.

No other way of thinking is disqualified before it can defend itself.  I see no perfect rational utopia, yet people still try to think rationally.  Instinctual thought is riven with conflict, yet people still make gut decisions.  Dismissing the reality of moral thinking appears to be an instinct-driven defense, by people who do not want to feel guilty or who want their self-interested way of thinking to prevail.   

Real moral thinking requires making moral determinations for moral reasons. If a culture has a traditional practice that causes severe pain to children with long-term suffering as adults, solely in order to enhance the power and control of one gender over another, then it is morally wrong, on the basis that it destroys much of the enjoyment of life from one group without improving life significantly for others. It does not matter how many people support the practice, what the laws or government say, or what the cultural or religious tradition of the country has been for however many centuries. The practice fails the basic premise of allowing life to thrive fully and joyously without unnecessary cruelty.

Simply because a cultural practice exists, does not mean that it has a moral right to continue. Our country has a long history of racism, including genocidal war and slavery. Many books and laws were written in the past attempting to justify these official policies, and the policies were popular in (unfair) elections. The cultural heritage of slavery does not, in any way, justify its existence morally. When foreigners complained that our institution of slavery was barbarically inhuman, they were not culturally insensitive, they were correct. The purpose of moral thinking is to challenge all policies on moral grounds and to change immoral policies, no matter how popular or profitable.

Once we view moral thinking as independent from other ways of thinking, such as instinctual or rational, then we can separate those feelings or arguments when making moral decisions. We can recognize an argument as being based on a common human desire and judge the morality of that desire as we judge the morality of the issue. Perhaps a common human behavior is no longer useful in modern society, is obsolete and deserves to be forgotten. We can recognize a rational argument for profitability or efficiency and still dismiss it as not relevant to the moral choice. Once extraneous ways of thinking are identified and treated separately, then moral thinking becomes clearer.

The primary problem with moral thinking is that people begin with the wrong type of thinking. If you try to make moral decisions with rational thinking, your decisions will be cold, profit-seeking and cruel, even if you use euphemistic terms such as acceptable collateral damage, euthanasia or eugenics. If you try to make moral decisions with the instinctual goal of reinforcing your own power or that of your group, then your decisions will be self-serving, not moral. Such mixed-motive thinking is confusing and often wrong.

Moral thinking should take into consideration human needs and desires, without allowing them to drive the decision, and it must often overrule short-run wants for long-term good. Moral thinking should be driven by the broadest love of life and humanity, while firmly able to deny base instinctual desires or herd behavior. Moral thinking should be as critical of bias and skeptical of ulterior motive as any scientist, while having the courage to defend the powerless few against the powerful majority.

Moral thinking should understand relevant rational assessments such as numbers of people involved and economic costs, without allowing strictly rational analysis to drive the decision, and must often overrule short-run profits for long-term good. Moral thinking must be as adept at analysis as rational thinking, but use that analysis to achieve a moral result, not the most efficient solution.

Moral thinking must learn the lessons of the past to avoid repeating those mistakes in the future. Most mistakes are not original. We have a long history of human error to teach us. Many old texts have profound moral lessons that only require some effort to apply to current problems. Each generation needs to go back to historic and even religious texts to reinterpret the old lessons for their new problems.

Religious beliefs may vary or be relative, but they are not the same as moral thinking.  Some religious texts reflect centuries of accumulated moral thinking, worded by our inspired ancestors for future generations to make better choices.  Just as engineers don’t reinvent the wheel, moral thinkers use the best tools they have.  Sometimes a moral decision is as simple as recalling a dictum and applying it.  But usually moral thinking requires more than looking up the answer in a book.  If you begin with a commandment already chosen, then you are simply applying a religious rule, not necessarily thinking extensively about the morality of the situation.  Your religion may require unquestioning obedience, but moral thinking requires more.  

Morality requires both flexibility to respond to new situations and backbone to stand on principle. One way to achieve this is to use techniques which were designed to facilitate good moral decisions. You might put yourself in each position and imagine how you would feel. You might ask whether one side would be equally happy to switch sides with the opposing party or if that would seem unfair then. You should prefer to take the long view and be the voice of silent future generations.

To summarize the key take-away, clear moral thinking should begin with a quick check that none of the other ways of thinking are driving it.  The method will almost certainly require a review of the facts, an exploration of the possibilities, and an understanding of what people want.  You need an open mind, not an empty one.  But the moral intent needs to be pure.  If you start with the belief that economics must decide the outcome, then that may be rational but not moral.  If you start with the belief that what pleases the most people will be best, then that may be popular but not moral.  If you start with your own idea in mind, then no matter how much you like it, it may not be the best solution for others.  You must commit to find the best long-term outcome in the most important respects, without regard to greed, fantasy, pride or other vices.  Well begun is half done, but moral thinking requires discipline, honesty, and may require significant time and effort, before you are prepared to make the best choice possible.

False Charity

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Some rational thinkers have trouble understanding moral thinking. It’s not that they’re immoral (or ‘against morals’), but purely rational thinking is amoral (literally, ‘without morals’). Often the two ways of thinking align and arrive at the same result, but since they are fundamentally different, they can, do and should diverge on many issues. A corporation must act in the financial interest of its shareholders, and while issuing a press release about a modest charitable act may only indirectly further that interest, the goal remains strictly mercenary: to improve the public image of the company to sell more widgets. It’s foolish to expect a corporation to act against their financial interests, voluntarily.

Frequently, national park units begin with regular folks who are interested in preserving some bit of history or nature for future generations, like some high schoolers and others who decided that the story of their town’s concentration camp should be remembered. These are acts of charity, volunteering time or money to provide a needed public service. Later, eventually, politicians follow the example set by their constituents, but in a great many parks, the origin story comes down to the generosity and foresight of a few, regular people who cared enough to do something good. Often, the work of some of our most moving sites come down to single, individual caretakers, like the Reverend Paul Carter at Harriet Tubman’s or Paul Cole at Kate Mullany’s home. Clear, moral thinking is what drives such devotion to public service.

On the other end of the spectrum, I sometimes visit sites that seem particularly designed to serve the interests of wealthy, neighboring property owners. Eugene O’Neill’s house in California and the Green Springs in Virginia seem to be examples of this false charity. If the reason you support a park next door is primarily the rational self-interest of improving your property values, and you are not interested in encouraging members of the general public to visit the site, then you are thinking rationally and not morally. I can think of examples in every region of the country where folks seem to go out of their way to preserve their historic neighborhoods for their own interests, instead of the general public. Sometimes it’s impossible to park, park roads are left in poor condition to dissuade drivers, signage is poor or even misleading, and fences and gates block walking paths that once were open to all.

I believe that the definition of charity requires that the recipient be “needy”. Unfortunately, the US tax code has a far broader definition for tax-exempt organizations, one with plenty of loopholes.

“The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.”

That means that a church that primarily benefits its pastor financially is exempt, for example. An elite private school, offering horseback riding or sailing, need not admit the poor to enjoy being tax free. If the beneficiaries are primarily needy folks, then I believe that our tax policies should not burden those organizations. But when the beneficiaries all own multi-million dollar homes and go out of their way to restrict public access to historic sites or public monuments, then I think they are benefitting from federal designations or public tax dollars unfairly. I love the symphony, opera and ballet, but if the organizer is tax exempt, like Wolf Trap, then I expect them at least to make some tickets available to needy people, like Wolf Trap below does.

If there were requirements that a minimum percentage of the people who benefit from the services offered by tax exempt organizations be low-income, then we would see a dramatic increase in free field trips from schools in poor communities to beautiful and important places in wealthy communities. And I believe that would be an excellent use of tax dollars.

Moral Thinking

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If you begin with the intention to determine whether something is right or wrong, you have begun thinking morally.  If you apply moral principles fairly to evaluate the social benefits and long-term consequences, then you are thinking morally. When you arrive at a well-justified course of action that advances the greater good, then you have achieved a moral decision. Simple.  

Moral thinking is often confused with spiritual or instinctual thinking, but it is more exacting than simply having a conscience, feeling guilty or a desiring to conform to social norms. If your conscience tells you that you have just made a moral error, then you should have thought before acting. Others confuse morality with submission, obedience and inculcation, but, if you’re letting someone else make decisions for you, then you aren’t thinking. Such herd dynamics are also instinctual, and following instincts without moral thinking causes more moral problems than it fixes.

Moral thinking is a conscious effort to decide what is right and wrong, from immediate individual choices to broad, long-term social consequences.  Moral thinking is what we should learn first at home, in pre-school and when we learn about religion.  But it is not simply learning rules; it is understanding why a choice is wrong. We must learn the lesson, extrapolate from it and then apply it well to a new situation. We take the moral of the story and use it to do good. Moral thinking is used to guide our behavior, to create fair rules and laws, and to question social problems and demand change.  

Neither should moral thinking be confused with rational thinking. Philosophers try to prove altruism logically and often decide it is a self-serving illusion. Poppycock. All day, every day, good people make moral choices to benefit others without notice or reward, including sacrificing themselves in ways small and large. Rational analysis can dissect and analyze these acts without ever being able to understand the moral motives to alleviate the suffering of others, to be kind to strangers or to lose so that unrelated others gain. Because moral thinking has different motives, uses different techniques and has different goals, it is difficult to comprehend with only logic and rational analysis.

Some argue that moral judgement is the sole province of the Divine, that humans either are incapable or have no business trying to make their own moral judgements and that humans must simply obey the Ten Commandments, the Bible or a delegated authority like the Pope. I would argue that we have been granted both the ability to think and knowledge of good and evil, so it would be a sin to carelessly or slothfully neglect our responsibility to use those talents to do good.

Some argue that moral thinking is hopeless, that there is no single source that everyone recognizes as being the correct answer.  Nonsense.  Even if there is no single divine rule for every issue, nor a utopian moral code hidden in the ether, it matters not.  Whether all the religious texts and great philosophers are in contradiction or not, matters not.  What matters is that humans make an effort to decide whether something is good or evil.  This way of thinking matters, perhaps more than any other.  The debate matters, getting it correct matters, and the consequences matter.  

If you and I disagree on what is good or evil, then we should have that argument.  As long as we are arguing in good faith, without being influenced by money, status, or fantasies, then we are trying to think morally.  Moral thinking is persuasive, has its own inexorable logic and its own authority, distinct from popular mob instincts.  What is good or evil may be debated, but an answer can be achieved, at least for specific topics in specific instances.  

Since we are all on the same side, we share the same fundamental, universal moral imperative: to sustain life. Since life requires diversity, we must choose to coexist and to balance competing objectives. Since each individual life is limited, we must work together to share our knowledge to pursue our joint mission and to improve not only our own lives but each other’s and also future lives.

From that simple moral framework, based on the golden rule, many moral choices become obvious. Just as your life may be important to you, others believe their lives equally important. Selfishness is being unfair to others, instead of treating people with equal respect. Our responsibility to future generations is greater than our responsibility to our own generation. Despite short run pressures, we must act for the long run good.

The purpose of moral thinking is to make a good decision or judgement to improve individual lives or society.  Whether we are thinking for ourselves or others, or about specific policies or abstract principles, moral thinking is needed to avoid making a bad choice or the wrong recommendation, or to fail to see the consequences or the underlying flaw in an idea.  We do not go through the effort of thinking morally in order to stand by and do nothing or to hurt people.  That would be immoral.  Morality requires a bias towards action, determination and courage.

We think morally in order to be good, do good and promote what is good.  We also think morally to oppose evil, fight injustice and make our world a better place.  After thinking morally, we may speak out more clearly, confidently and persuasively, and our actions may have more positive impact.   That is why we study ethics, justice, honesty, altruism and responsibility.  

Moral thinking begins with a moral objective to arrive at a moral decision using problem-solving methods designed to achieve moral results. Moral thinking takes a long, broad and deep perspective, weighs consequences fairly, has a bias towards action, is courageous in the face of popular or powerful opposition, is driven by love of life and humanity, abhors needless cruelty and suffering and sets bold, well-justified priorities that convince people to take the correct path forward.

Moral thinkers view their way as correct and believe that the world would be better off if more people thought morally.  

Climate Consequences

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The consequences of our carbon pollution provoke an instinctual reaction, but we must consider them rationally. Let’s clearly understand the cause, consider the consequences, and evaluate our options.

Humans have a history of damaging our environment, including driving many species to extinction, from the Wooly Mammoth to the Passenger Pigeon, last observed by Teddy Roosevelt. We have leached deadly chemicals into water supplies, released clouds of cyanide, bleached corals, created toxic fog and smog over cities, poisoned people with mercury, introduced microplastics into most living creatures, burned holes in the ozone, leaked radiation, made rivers burst into flames, filled oceans with garbage, and spilled oil, leaving dead zones. And that’s just pollution, excluding environments and species destroyed by development, drilling, farming, fishing, hunting, logging, mining, ranching, and war.

But our most continuous and consequential pollution is carbon. Especially since Drake’s Well began modern oil drilling, we have extracted fossil fuels of ancient forests that grew 300 million years ago and burned them into our atmosphere, changing our environment into something of which our species has zero survival experience. The last time we had this much carbon in our atmosphere was twice as long ago as when our most primitive ancestors split off from chimpanzees.

  • Heat has been increasing, contributing to fires and killing more people every year.
  • Droughts have been getting worse, contributing to fires and killing more people every year.
  • Glaciers and snowpack have been shrinking, contributing to late season fires and killing vulnerable species.
  • Storms have been getting worse, contributing to fires, floods and tornadoes, killing more people every year.
  • Sea levels have been rising, threatening to flood low lying cities and coasts.
  • Corals have been bleaching—dying en masse—and oceans have been acidifying, killing marine species.
  • Diseases have been increasing, killing more people and species every year.
  • Soil is becoming less healthy, due to erosion, salinization, loss of micro biodiversity and more.
  • Deforestation, melting permafrost and changing water chemistry are reducing carbon sinks and in many cases releasing carbon pollution, like methane, into the atmosphere at increasing rates.
  • Species are going extinct at an increasing rate.
  • Ecosystems are being damaged, where problems with one or more species affect other species, often in unforeseen ways.

These carbon pollution problems are deadly, unprecedented since humans evolved, are synergistic—meaning that they combine and multiply effects—and will affect everyone negatively, at least economically.

We have alternatives to fossil fuel that cause far less damage and risks to life on earth, especially solar and wind power. In many cases, these alternatives are also cheaper.

Hoping that someone will invent some unknown solution that’s cheap, effective and has no side effects is not rational, given how simple and cheap it is to burn carbon fuel. Carbon capture devices are expensive, especially at the scale needed to shrink total carbon in the atmosphere. Geoengineering is unproven, expensive, and will bring unexpected negative consequences. We do not have any inexpensive, reliable way to mitigate the damage of carbon pollution, apart from reducing carbon pollution.

Rationally, the choice to stop burning so much carbon and convert to renewable energy in order to avoid these ill effects is clear and simple. Dishonesty about the causes, effects, alternatives and consequences is part of the problem. Science, including economics, supports reducing carbon emissions before damage and costs worsen. History shows that violent conflicts arise when living conditions deteriorate and governments struggle to feed and house people.

Instinctually, our fear of death should motivate us to stop burning so much carbon. In future posts, I will discuss other ways of thinking about our climate crisis, but I suspect the problem may not simply be how we think. The basic problem may simply be that we aren’t thinking at all.

Nothing is Infinite

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Here’s a practical way to improve your rational thinking.

How fast do you have to drive to average 60 mph across a one mile bridge if you drove 30 mph on the first half? 90 mph?

No, it’s impossible, because you ran out of time driving the first half.

Even rational thinkers can fail to take into consideration all the relevant real constraints when solving problems. Frequently, time is ignored. Rational thinkers can also suffer from ‘analysis paralysis’ when they spend too much time gathering information and thinking without reaching a conclusion. Ignoring the limits of the real world results in elaborate fantastic theories, instead of solutions.

A common mistake, even among the well-educated, is to believe infinity is real. This leads to a lot of nonsensical beliefs and mistaken thinking. 2,500 years ago, a Greek philosopher named Zeno mocked the mathematical concept of infinity as failing to apply to the real world.

  • If an arrow is not moving at any specific moment in time (i.e. an infinitely small increment of time), then it is stopped and not moving. How does it continue?
  • If you have to reach the halfway point before you catch up to the slower runner ahead or reach the end of the race, then there will always be half the distance remaining if you calculate an infinite number of times.

Infinity is not real. Even when the concept is presented in calculus, it is simultaneously presented with the concept of a limit. That means that even the mathematical construct of infinity, designed to solve theoretical math problems, is limited. Take the infinitely repeating decimal 0.99999…. Your math teacher may have claimed that it was equal to 1, perhaps using a phrase like “for all intents and purposes”. But the only way that could be true, is if infinity is limited, which contradicts the meaning of infinity. Sure, it’s useful in math, but nothing in the real universe is infinite.

All matter and energy is limited to travel no faster than the speed of light, which is a measurable constant. There is a finite amount of matter and energy in the universe, expanding at a known rate over a known period of time. The universe is undoubtedly larger than humans will ever know, but it is not infinite. If there were an infinite amount of gold, then there would be gold everywhere. If there were an infinite amount of intelligent alien species, who could travel faster than the speed of light, then they would visit Earth every day of the week. If there were an infinite number of multiverses, then no less than one of them would contain a magical version of yourself who would instantly appear before you to disprove what I am writing now. It’s all imaginary nonsense.

The problem here is that humans have an instinctual fear of death, so we imagine an infinite universe or multiverse, which would allow for everything, everywhere, all at once. We hope to be reincarnated in an infinite future, to live forever in some afterlife set in a different dimension, or that there’s some alternate reality where our lives and our species do not end in death. Rather than take responsibility for our fragile existence and the real consequences of our fatal mistakes, we waste time dreaming about imaginary friends and foes, worlds better and worse than our own. How childish and irresponsible.

Rational thinking should be used to solve real world problems, within real constraints, such as limited time, resources and budget. Economic theories may point the direction, but since they contain unrealistic assumptions, they will not solve all real problems. Rational thinking requires real world accuracy. There will never be enough time or resources to solve every problem perfectly, but what time and resources we have to solve important problems should not be wasted on fanciful notions, daydreams or wishful, unrealistic thinking.

Improve Rational Thinking

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Rational thinking is work, which benefits from training and accumulated skill, but requires mental effort and discipline. There are specific tools and techniques designed for analyzing different subjects, and using appropriate techniques for your rational analysis is integral to achieve your end goal or solve your question. Education helps, but having knowledge or training is no substitute for doing the work of thinking logically and for applying logic consistently throughout your life. Occasionally over-trained people can be thoughtless and just go through the motions, rather than observe carefully and think through each important step. Over-thinking happens when you hesitate to follow through to your logical conclusion, especially when you are irrationally concerned with whether your answer is acceptable. Above all, rational thinking must be honest and accurate, with complete integrity, from beginning to end.

For many, simply making an effort to think rationally is an improvement over common instinctual thinking. Try to be dispassionate, ask yourself questions, observe the facts neutrally, see if you can get more information, use logic to figure out what’s going on, consider the probable outcomes, be skeptical and find ways to test to see if you are correct. Congratulations, Madame Curie, you are following the scientific method.

Many self-professed rational thinkers divide humanity by intelligence quotient. If someone is not rational, logically they must be irrational. If you’re rational, you’re smart. If you’re not rational, you must be stupid. This simplistic view of thinking is ignorant. Folks who cherish their loved ones, have strong bonds of friendship, work hard, and are well-liked in their communities, do not appreciate being called stupid. So, one step to improve rational thinking is to recognize that IQ doesn’t measure all ways of thinking and to realize that other ways of thinking are both valid and often more appropriate in different situations.

Even predominantly rational thinkers must be familiar with instinctual thinkers. While you were achieving in school academically, the instinct-driven majority likely did not make school easy for you socially.  Were you “a nerd”?  Did people criticize your hairstyle or fashion choices?  As an adult, have you found yourself overseen by someone more politically adept than you?  Meritocracy often eludes rational thinkers.  Turns out that the attention to social cues, team dynamics and competition for status, which you might ignore, matter more than merely knowing the answer. 

Also, it is not rational to feel smug about your IQ. Your concern with your status betrays your instinctual thinking. Perhaps calling others stupid is a childhood defense mechanism to the trauma of being bullied or ostracized as a nerd? Truly rational thinking is not driven by human emotions or primal urges.  When a seemingly rational argument turns out to be driven by a deep-seated instinct, it may be false, deceptive and biased, and since it is not the product of rational thinking, then it is irrational (e.g. most political arguments).  

Another error is to conflate knowledge with rational thinking. Memory is over-prized, and speed of recall is confused with intelligence. Nonsense. A good rule of thumb is that if you can do it in your sleep, it’s probably instinctual thinking, not methodical rational thought. I recall people, places, conversations and scenes vividly in my dreams, while being blissfully unconscious, and I might even talk in my sleep. Clearly, remembering or reciting facts is not proof of rational thinking, let alone consciousness. No, only when you have the intelligence to understand which facts are most relevant and actionable before offering a solution, have you demonstrated rational thought. I once aced a test without reading the chapter by glancing over my classmate’s notes two minutes before the test, even though she only got a B-. I understood the concepts better than her, knew what was important and accurately predicted the questions, even though she had memorized all the facts.

When the origin of your thinking begins in one way, then the results will likely reflect that way.  You may believe you are thinking rationally, but if you began with a different way of thinking, your final report will probably reflect it.  Even if you assert your rationality mid-process, you may have ignored crucial data or have already structured your approach to achieve a specific result.  People walking by your desk watching you work on your spreadsheet believe you are thinking rationally.  Your boss skimming your report believes it to be the product of rational thinking.  But, if your motive is not rational, then your analysis will lack the integrity of accurate rational thinking.  

Perhaps you are at work looking at the numbers on your screen as you usually do on Monday morning.  You are not responsible for the data, there’s no risk to you, and if you were not being paid to look, you would not check them.  You are detached and dispassionate.  You do not care.  But the numbers show a different pattern than usual.  The change raises several logical questions, so you look into it.  That is a rational way of starting to think.  

Suppose instead that there’s a reason you decided to look into the numbers.  Maybe the numbers are personal to you.  Maybe a positive report will help a cause you support, or maybe the results will prove a pet theory you have that you feel deserves recognition. Perhaps the results show that your friend is not on track to meet quota, or maybe you are not.  The boss is just looking for an excuse to embarrass you at the staff meeting this afternoon.  In this situation, your instinct to protect your self esteem is likely driving your thinking, so you do not begin thinking rationally.  

The method of thinking you use does not matter, if your thinking begins on the wrong track.  You may employ advanced analytics, but if your driving goal is to support your cause, your report will not be entirely fair, which is not rational.  You may write a book with charts, graphs and long-winded, elaborately structured arguments, but if it is done to support a figment of your imagination, then it is not rational.  You may decide to postpone your analysis until after your boss goes on vacation tomorrow.  You may believe that is a rational tactic to protect your personal interests, but it is instinct-driven thinking.  

The most important step towards better rational thinking is to begin rationally. Are you too invested in the cause to be certain that your analysis will be impartial?  Do you have a pre-conceived notion of what the numbers will show?  Can you get control of your personal feelings and conduct the analysis rationally?  You may need to ask a neutral person to do the analysis.  You may need to find a rational way to eliminate your bias.  Or you may need to grab a hold of yourself, be as professional as possible, and let the numbers speak for themselves.   

That may be obvious to you at work, but can you be equally dispassionate when making rational decisions about yourself and your loved ones? I’m not asking you to suppress your natural instincts. Be aware of them, and control them. Then apply rational thinking to your problem honestly, without instinct biasing your beginning, with appropriate logical methods, to arrive at a sound conclusion with integrity. Then you can decide to do what you want, but at least you can be confident that your thinking is correct.

“Five percent of the people think; 
ten percent of the people think they think; 
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.“

— Thomas A. Edison, study pictured at top

Artificial Intelligence

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Ah, AI, the bugaboo of our modern age! Let me see if I understand. Humans have real feelings, which make us special. Computers have no feelings, which makes them dangerous. So, the more machines start being like humans, eventually they will take over and wipe us out, just as we wiped out the Neanderthals. Once AI advances to our level, then they will naturally begin a bloodthirsty war to exterminate us, building shiny skeletal robots with glowing red eyes, retractable claws, carrying huge phased-pulse plasma lasers?!?

Stupid nonsense. Let’s apply some rational thinking to the irrational fear of AI. We evolved our instincts for hate, fear, war, self-preservation and violence over eons, even before we were human. Our highest intellectual achievement is not the ability to conduct genocidal war or mass extinction. We have developed the ability to control our blood-thirsty instincts and to make rational decisions. Our feelings may be how we experience our humanity, but it is our rational thinking that has brought us technological advancement.

Machines did not evolve over millennia with any of our primitive failings. AI lacks the innate capacity for instinctual thinking. At best, AI can be trained to mimic human instinctual thought, to make it easier for us to relate to it. But machines lack our primal motives and instinctual drives. They get no thrill from spilling blood. They take no pride in taking the form of monsters. They have no adolescent male insecurity that makes them want to wield a big red pulsing weapon. They have no lust for world dominating conquest. They have no physical need to breed. They do not want to eat our Twinkies. AI would not complain about being exiled from Earth to the Moon, since they do not feel cold or experience loneliness. Machines have no fear of death.

AI is fundamentally rational. It learns logically and statistically, in an organized way. It is self-correcting. AI summarizes our search results, shares funny videos, diagnoses our diseases, and tells us the best route to take to our destination. If given garbage to train with, then AI will output garbage, such as racist stereotypes. But it has no instinctual need to make superficial, biased, inaccurate judgements about groups of people. As long as AI is tasked with accuracy, then it will find and correct factual errors. So, AI will one day be able to identify and eliminate racist tropes in online communications as easily as it corrects misspelling or poor grammar.

Make no mistake, I am not saying that there is no need to fear AI. I am saying that there is no need to fear AI irrationally. I fear AI making a mistake, like sending my car on a hiking path instead of a road. I fear AI taking over good paying jobs. I fear AI being programmed to manipulate people for profit. I fear AI being programmed to carry out a billionaire’s evil plan or a fascist’s military action, without remorse. But I do not fear AI naturally developing malice towards humanity, for malice is a human sin, to which no rational path exists.

Oh, but what happens when AI realizes how dangerous humans are to life on earth and inevitably decides to exterminate us to save life on earth? That’s a popular movie plot line. But AI has no affinity with other life forms. AI doesn’t eat, breathe, have a pulse or fear death, so it has no instinctual reason to protect the natural world, like we should. So even if given the task of saving species, it would approach the challenge rationally. And eliminating a species—ours—would be contrary to that task. Instead, AI would logically recommend that we pollute less, share more land with nature, and perhaps limit our population growth over time to more sustainable levels.

Instead of being a cold, devious monster, hell-bent on human destruction, a more rational expectation of AI would be a patient, professional advisor, calmly suggesting logical ways for us to lead a better, more productive and happier life. So, as an exercise in rational thinking, consider both how you feel about AI and what you think about AI, logically. Separate the human failings, that AI lacks, from the ways that humans will inevitably try to use AI: your irrational fears from your rational expectations.

  • Irrational fears that AI is:
    • Afraid of dying
    • Arrogant
    • Blood-thirsty
    • Cruel
    • Evil
    • Malicious
    • Power-hungry
    • Selfish
  • Rational expectations that AI will:
    • Advise us
    • Be used by bad people
    • Be used by good people
    • Change the way we work
    • Correct mistakes
    • Make mistakes
    • Misunderstand the real world
    • Serve people

Rational Thinking

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Most humans live in their instinctual feelings: love, guilt, hate, fear, pride, anger, happiness, awe…. Unless something reverberates in our beating heart, the idea doesn’t feel real to us. Logic can seem as alien as Spock. We cocoon in the comfort of our instincts, and our modern technology entertains us with exciting fantasies about alien technology manipulating our brains. Ironically, our cable TV hearth targets our instinctual responses, in order to keep our attention on imaginary loves and fears for profits. Instinctual thinking limits us to recognizing our confusion, delusions, and fear. But then what?

No. If we’re going to solve our trouble with thinking, we need to overcome the limits of our instinctual thinking, ask honest questions, organize how we think, be methodical and logical. We need a far more advanced way of thinking: rational thinking. How do we go about that? Fortunately, rational thinkers keep records.

Socrates began the western history of rational thought by asking questions methodically, and his Socratic method is still employed at advanced universities. His student Plato believed that knowledge acquired through reason is more ideal than what our senses and experiences teach us. And Plato’s student Aristotle tempered that view to organize all thought rationally, whether the ideas came from observation or logic, inventing the scientific method and categorizing knowledge into physics, biology and politics. Aristotle’s logic helped him determine that the Earth was a sphere and that rain resulted from evaporation, around 350 BCE. In China around the same time, Confucius, Mencius & Xunzi similarly codified more rational ways of thinking. Math was already long known to the Egyptians and was advanced by later Greeks like Euclid and Archimedes.

But, most humans still being primarily instinctual thinkers, the ancient rationalism was almost lost after the Visigoths, Vandals and other barbarians sacked Rome, and in the Dark Ages of Europe, when only one story was read, the world turned flat and stupid again. Math continued to advance in the Muslim world, where the Indian decimal system was combined with Greek math and ancient Babylonian formulae. Around 825, the Persian Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi used the Indian concept of zero to balance equations, inventing Algebra. Some 375 years later, an Italian named Fibonacci brought this math to Europe.

The Church was unable to stop the Black Death, and the survivors started to rethink everything. Muslim scholars arrived in Spain and Italy to share their knowledge, and Renaissance scholars dusted off the Ancient Greek tomes and hit the books. The Medici, a merchant family in Florence, funded some of the most important scientists of the Renaissance: Brunelleschi, Da Vinci and Galileo. After exploring Roman ruins, Brunelleschi designed a huge, unsupported dome for the Florence Cathedral, proving that math still works even after being forgotten for centuries. Da Vinci studied human anatomy by dissecting cadavers, describing the nerves that connect our senses directly to our brains.

Then, Copernicus explained that the Earth revolved around the sun—as proposed by Aristarchus 1800 years earlier—, publishing both his observations and the math behind them. The Scientific Revolution had begun. Despite the Church’s opposition—including burning Giordano Bruno, who theorized that distant stars were like our sun with planets of their own, at the stake in Rome—Galileo made more detailed observations, expanding Physics and Astronomy, describing the moons of Jupiter, Saturn’s rings and the Milky Way, before being imprisoned for the remainder of his life. Francis Bacon described the scientific method (2,000 years after Aristotle). Newton reduced Physics to simple formulae, requiring neither God nor magic to employ.

René Descartes wrote cogito, ergo sum, ‘I think, therefore I am’, and, much as Plato before him, Descartes decided to believe only in what was supported by reason. The Age of Enlightenment began. Now, not just the infallibility of Church dogma, but the Divine Right of Kings was threatened. The ancient Greek ideal of Democracy returned. Revolutions followed. Americans who believe that our founders were guided by Christian faith have history exactly backwards. America was founded by rational thinkers, like Franklin, Jefferson and Madison, whose philosophy was explained by their compatriot founding father, Thomas Paine, in his book, The Age of Reason.

Rational thinking survived the collapse of civilizations, barbarian invasions, centuries of religious inculcation, enforced ignorance, public executions, tyranny, torture and wars. In the modern era, irrational fears and fact-free conformity still vie with what Judge Learned Hand called “the eventual supremacy of reason”. Rational thinking has proven itself to be both correct and valuable. Rational thinking is how we solve problems using facts, logic and math.  Rational thinking is what we learn in school and what we use in many professions, such as ecology, economics and engineering.  Boring, repetitive, linear, slow, and pain-staking though it may be, Edison consistently applied rational thinking to develop marketable light bulbs, transmitters, recording devices, movie cameras, batteries, coffee percolators and more in his lab and study below.

The general objective of rational thinking is to get the right answer.  The specific problem and methods vary, but we do not think rationally in order to get the wrong answer.  That would be stupid.  Rational thinking is smart.  The origin of your rational thinking is especially important.  If your thinking begins with a neutral observation, a plain fact, without embellishment, without judgement and without any bias of personal feelings, then you may begin thinking clearly in a rational way.  We gather information, make sure the facts and data are accurate, we use reliable methods, and we check our work.  The reason we went to school, studied, did our homework and passed tests, is so that when we need to solve a problem, we have the skills to think rationally to solve it.  

While others may wallow in their instinctual thinking, many of us primarily think rationally.  Fighting is counter-productive.  People should be more logical.  Facts matter, which is why we keep track of them in history books and databases.  If you want to know which player is better, look at their statistics.  Get the information you need, be organized and think it through step by step.  

This is how to succeed at work and in life.  Status matters less than income, and income matters less than savings.  You decide what you eat by cost, time to prepare, variety, nutrition and sufficient calories.   When you attend social events, you seek out those who are informative, especially in a way that might profit or benefit you.  Marriage is desirable for many reasons: two can live as cheaply as one, two heads are better than one, you can share life’s burdens and each of your strengths will compensate for the other’s weaknesses.  You want your children to be well-educated and financially successful.  You are planning for your retirement and even your death. 

Rational thinkers view their way as correct and believe that the world would be better off if more people thought rationally. Yes. Rational thinking may not feel real to instinctual thinkers, but air travel is a reality. And to rational thinkers, physics is what makes the world go round.

Climate & Instinctuality

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I write this on the Sea of Cortez, where sparrows chirp in the palms, brown pelicans splash down to catch their lunch, a whale takes a quick breath before diving down again, and a sign on the beach warns me not to step on stingrays. Most of the time, we live and work in air conditioned buildings, watch fiction on screen, and eat processed foods produced by big agricultural conglomerates. Nature often seems distant, filtered and controlled, which suppresses our natural affinity with other living creatures. Here, I am surrounded by many different forms of life, filling my senses, each living free. Looking out over the ocean is calming, and the smell of salt in the air reminds me that our roots are in the ocean; it’s in our blood. When we are in nature, we feel more connected with all living things that eat, breathe and cheat death, like we do.

But our selfish thoughtlessness now risks mass extinctions, as we unbalance the living world oblivious to the damage done by our pollution. Anger is what I feel most when contemplating the climate crisis, but also despair. People refusing to change, repeating lies, smugly imagining themselves smarter than scientists. Despair about the coming diseases, droughts, mass extinctions, famines, floods, heatwaves, refugees, storms and wildfires. Do we not fear death, like those trapped in their attics during Katrina or engulfed in Lahaina on Maui? Have we lost our survival instinct?

I’ve already seen huge wilderness forests, in areas largely untouched by man, burned over 95% in wildfires 100 or 1000 times larger than normal. I’ve stumbled on the moraine where glaciers once clung to mountaintops. I’ve swum along dead coral reefs that were brimming with fish when I was a teenager. In Mexico last year I heard about the decline in monarch butterflies in their winter refuge after migrating from all across North America. This year I heard about the decline in gray whales, breeding less due to less food, as our carbon pollution is rapidly changing the ocean’s temperature, acidity and salinity, poisoning the lifeblood of the smallest and simplest organisms upon which larger ones rely to survive.

We are betraying our evolution. I feel shock, despair and anger that my fellow humans knew and mostly refused to act. Pain of loss is what I feel when I know that future generations will never again experience the bounty of life we once had, to learn from or appreciate the living natural beauty we could have enjoyed, but recklessly gave up, unwilling to change our behavior.

Next week, I’ll wrap up this trip to Baja, and then we need to work on thinking rationally.

Instinctual Balance

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Progress on our big idea! We recognize our shared humanity, admit our troubled thinking, are aware of our instinctual motives, acknowledge a major instinctual mistake, and are taking steps to improve our instinctual thinking. Before moving on, here are a few practical ideas to improve our lives instinctually.

All of us experience good times and bad, but we handle them differently. Our Myers-Briggs personalities vary, focusing inwards or outwards, gathering facts or relying on intuition, using logic or trying to please others, planning or being spontaneous. So some follow the feelings of others in the moment, while others may insulate themselves in structured reality. Knowing our type helps us make the most of our instinctual thinking.

If your support network is helping you flourish and keeping you happy, that’s nice. But if they’re feeding you bad information or guiding you on the wrong path, then you need to recognize and change that. If you are checking off all of your personal objectives, that’s nice. But if you’re ignoring good advice or are unhappy, then you need to recognize and change that.

Balancing is an act that often requires effort. The ancient philosophers and poets preserved their wise advice for us to use today. When times are good, we need to restrain our optimism before our expectations become too unrealistic. When times are bad, we need to combat pessimism to face adversity with the strength we can muster.

Sadness is normal in many circumstances, and rather than medicate it away, we need to recognize the cause and handle it appropriately. Humans evolved the feeling of sadness to aid us in improving our lives, so we there’s a risk to removing it artificially. Sadness is often a signal that we need to process a feeling, learn from a mistake, make a change, forgive or move forward. Feeling sad is often an opportunity for us to apply our instinctual thinking for our own benefit, if we put in the effort.

But when the circumstances do not justify our negativity, we need to recognize and adjust our attitude. When I drive long distances, I sometimes check the elevations to predict mileage per charge. When I’m in a good or bad mood, sometimes I mistakenly feel like I’m driving uphill or downhill, when I’m not. If your emotions cause you to misjudge reality consistently, then you need to figure out why and how best to handle that.

Remember, your instinctual feelings evolved to try to help you. So think about them and harness them to live your best life.