Beliefs Archives - Page 3 of 24

Existential Troublesome Knowledge

January 18, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

There’s troublesome knowledge—and then there’s existential troublesome knowledge.

The concept of troublesome knowledge was developed in academia and has since been applied and utilized in many academic and non-academic areas including scientific exploration, mathematics, politics, finance, history, and even writing.

To refresh, knowledge is troublesome when it:

conflicts with preexisting beliefs, especially if those beliefs are deeply held
is counterintuitive or seems illogical
is complex or difficult to understand
is disconcerting
requires a (transformational) change in self-perception

Troublesome knowledge within a field of inquiry or endeavor is one thing. But troublesome knowledge about the very nature of how we as humans function and our experience in and of the world—i.e., existential troublesome knowledge—is something else altogether. It’s troublesomeness squared, at the very least.

Many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves…are false. —Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal

Phenomenal Individualism and Its Implications

The pursuit of existential troublesome knowledge leads us to a number of inescapable conclusions that point in the direction of what has been called phenomenal individualism.

Our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality, which means things are not as they seem.
We cannot fully know or access the experience of any other person or creature.
What we don’t know far exceeds what we know, and no matter how much we learn, this will always be the case; yet we operate as if what we see is all there is (WYSIATI).
Not only is everything everywhere in motion all the time, but everything (including each of us) is a process, and everything is an interpretation.
Rather than being, or resembling, a mechanical system, each of us is a complex adaptive system, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
These factors all constrain our experience of being in the world—and there is no way out of these constraints—but they also create a space of possibilities, including the possibility of creating transformational change.

I believe the fact that our experience is not an accurate reflection of reality is the foundational threshold concept that we must get (incorporate into our mental model) in order to grasp the nature of our existence and experience: our space of possibilities.

You may recall that threshold concepts are likely to be, among other things:

Transformative: they lead to a significant shift in perspective that alters our sense of who we are as well as what we see, the way we see it, and how we feel and think about it.
Irreversible: they involve crossing a “threshold,” after which our previous understanding is no longer readily accessible.
Integrated: they reveal relationships and connections of aspects and ideas that were previously seen as unrelated.
Troublesome: they are difficult concepts to grasp and are therefore troublesome (see troublesome knowledge above).

The Space of Possibilities

What you or I make of the characteristics that circumscribe our existence—how we interpret them and work with them—depends on our mental model of the world, which includes our personality and our beliefs.

Do you find the idea that things are not only not as they seem, but never as they seem disturbing, confusing, trivial, or intriguing?

Is the idea that the extent of what we don’t know will always be far greater than the extent of what we know frustrating, obvious, or expansive?

Does knowing that everything you experience is the result of your brain’s interpretation of data that other brains are very likely interpreting differently make you curious or does it feel unnerving or even threatening?

The Thin Slice

It has become clear that our brains sample just a small bit of the surrounding physical world. —David Eagleman, Incognito

Although what Eagleman says is true, and it’s possible to grasp the concept intellectually, it is simply impossible for us to experience. That’s because our brain is continuously assessing and interpreting the data it has access to as if it is all the data there is. How else could it operate?

If we really understand and acknowledge this aspect of reality—that we are always working with limited information we treat as if it is all the information—we must realize that a likely majority of the conclusions and explanations we take for granted are inaccurate, sometimes extremely so. Our brain can’t take into account factors of which it is unaware. Yet there are always factors that affect us of which we and our brain are unaware.

The conclusions and explanations we arrive at daily are often good enough for us to get by—not so erroneous they threaten our survival. But that isn’t always the case. And even if they don’t threaten our survival, they can modify our mental model in ways that lead to maladaptive perceptions of our internal and external world. Taking all of our perceptions for granted can have detrimental effects on our experience and therefore on our actions in and reactions to the world, as well as our wellbeing, and our relationships with others.

We are not significantly different from humans of the past who didn’t believe in the existence of germs or bacteria because they couldn’t see them with the naked eye. Or humans who believed the earth was the center of the solar system. Or that the brain was a useless organ—or that we only use 10% of it. Or that our memories are accurate, and eye-witness accounts are reliable.

When more information was obtained, we modified our understanding of germs and the solar system and the brain and memory and eye-witness accounts. We have enough information now to modify our understanding of how we operate and how our experience is based on our interpretations.

If we don’t, or don’t want to, understand this thing called phenomenal individualism, we will constantly be at the effect of our mistaken beliefs, locked into a perceptual and experiential system within which we have very little room to maneuver and no room at all to create transformational change.

On the other hand, we can step into and take an active role within this space of possibilities.

More to come!

You Are Here. What Do You Want?

August 20, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Imagine if you will a store directory at any shopping mall. Imagine you are at the spot marked “You Are Here.” Why are you here? Are you going to a particular store? Or are you here to meet someone, just to browse, or to “kill time”? Is it cold or warm? Are you in a hurry? It’s not a covered mall; what happens if it unexpectedly begins to rain?

Loud music is coming through the open door of the record store. People swarm past you and might accidentally bump into you. You smell coffee brewing. The colors and shapes in some windows attract you; perhaps you stop to look at things you weren’t intending to buy. And everywhere you go, “You Are Here.”

Someone figured out that we process about 126 bits of information per second or 7,560 per minute or almost half a billion per hour. [Note: The current estimate is closer to a third of that, or 40 bits per second.]

Who is the “You” who is here processing these bits of information? As near as I can tell, you’re a somewhat chaotic conglomeration of elements that fall into two categories: 1) what you came in with and 2) what’s been added since [aka nature and nurture].

The first category includes things like gender, birth order, ethnic orientation, basic human instincts, and your own individual abilities and handicaps.

The second category is comprised in part of what you have learned, your social conditioning, your religious or spiritual convictions [or lack thereof], various thoughts and feelings you’ve had, and the particular beliefs you’ve evolved [or that have evolved you].

Some of your parts are probably operating smoothly, some are undoubtedly a mess, and there are many others of which you are more or less unaware.

Now here “You” are, in the middle of the shopping mall of life, bombarded with more stimuli than you can ever hope to process, trying to get what you came here for. What’s a poor shopper to do?

Well, there are many techniques available to help you get “what you really want in life.” One method specifies that you don’t have to “get better” to get what you want. But another claims to only be effective when “used in alignment with [your] highest goals and purposes.” A book titled You Can Have It All reminds us that the universe is perfect and that whatever you have you must want or you wouldn’t have it. Therefore, to have something else, you must change what you want.

What Do You Want?

Some people seem to know right off, while others freeze at the very question. You can simply make up what you want. Or you can work through exercises that help you sort through all your layers to find out what you really want.

Once you decide what it is, there are various approaches you can take to get it.

But the juice here is not the “what” in what you want. It’s that identifying what you want enables you to set goals, and goals are an excellent tool [an affordance, one might say] to help you focus your awareness and make some sense of all the bits of information coming at you.

I’m inclined to agree with those who say the universe doesn’t have the slightest interest in what we want.* So even if you do all the right things to get what you want, you might get it or you might not get it.

*In fact, I’ve said that if the universe cares about my personal affairs, it needs to get a job.

This is an article I wrote exactly 33 years ago (the bracketed text indicates an edit or editorial comment) for a column called Random Access.

I knew almost nothing about the brain and behavior because most of what I know now hadn’t been discovered yet. Farther to Go! wasn’t even a pipe dream, and I had no concept of being on a quest of any kind. Yet the concerns I had then are the same concerns I have today. Am I…are you…up to something? Or are we hanging around the mall trying to “kill time”? Are we on the aspirational superhighway or are we still window shopping?

What do you want? The shopping mall directory can tell you where you are, but if you haven’t identified a destination it can’t tell you how to get anywhere else.

Everything Is an Interpretation

May 26, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In the world in which we live:

everything everywhere is in motion all the time
everything is a process
everything is an interpretation

These three facts are interrelated, but they tend to be descriptive of what’s occurring at different scales.

The fact that everything everywhere is in motion all the time is a somewhat abstract concept that has significant practical implications. In and of itself, though, it’s difficult to grasp or experience directly.

The fact that everything is a process, while less abstract, can also be a bit slippery. We’re used to thinking of things as . . . things. It’s easier to recognize organic processes—or processes that involve people—than it is to recognize inorganic processes. Nevertheless, there are no things, only processes.

The fact that everything is an interpretation has moment-to-moment, immediate impact. Interpretations are the foundation of every single one of our experiences. But that doesn’t mean this concept is any easier to grasp.

The limited capacity of ordinary consciousness—aka the 40-bit brain—makes it much too slow to catch any of the interpretations the unconscious is making as it is making them. It wouldn’t be particularly useful to be able to do so. The unconscious has to interpret everything, from the most basic incoming audio and visual signals to your heart rate to the responses of strangers you encounter to the results of an election in a foreign country.

The unconscious makes these interpretations—which neuroscientist Anil Seth and others have called “best guesses”—so quickly that ordinary consciousness accepts them as reality. Even when we know or believe this to be the case, we have an extremely difficult time distinguishing between the facts of an event and our brain’s interpretation of it.

Several clients who have completed multiple iterations of the What Else Is This Telling Me? exercise can attest to this difficulty and were willing to share their experiences.

Donna

Something happened.

But what? No, not that, that’s an interpretation. No, not that, either; that’s probably a hidden belief. So what happened?

This is a question that’s been bouncing around in my brain for the last several months. I always thought I knew what happened. And what my interpretation was. And what my belief behind it was. I mean, I’m a licensed counselor. I’ve taught this to graduate students. Maybe I was wrong?

It’s been interesting and exasperating to break down to the grain what happened. I don’t think I have a firm grasp of it yet, but I’m getting there—a grain at a time. Wysiati (what you see is all there is)!

Kelly

What was that event? It just tumbled into interpretation and took flight. It seemed as though I was tangling with a bucking bronco that did not want to be tamed or understood. It seems to me that all these pieces of me don’t get out much. I’m trying to pry them open, if only a little: event identification practice . . . interpretation practice . . . it’s been part of the conversation I hope to keep having. I want to know what’s running the program.

Leslie

I think the idea that has become the most clear for me is that the mental model cannot be changed without changing a belief or beliefs that create it. Since we’re mostly unaware of our beliefs, the exercise is a way to expose some of those beliefs. And it has taken all those iterations for me to see how the interpretations, the actions, and the beliefs have to relate to each other.

Adam

It’s powerful and surprising how deep simple reactions go and how hard it is to isolate events, interpretations, and beliefs!

Additionally, it has been hard to ask questions about it for me. I didn’t seem to form the questions, much less make the next step to pursue what the questions might bring up. I had my doubts about how clear I was about how I was doing the different parts of the exercise, but I didn’t clarify my doubts until after about three times trying to complete it.

Debra

In my cohort, on our fourth go round, I finally thought I’d nailed what an interpretation of an event was. I mean, it just has to be simple, right? Nope. I was frustrated. Wanted to quit. Almost started to cry. Even raised my voice a bit.

My cohort leapt in to support me to keep going, asking questions with genuine curiosity—not just for me to see something, but because they were also getting closer to understanding.

When I broke through the frustration, I felt like I/we had made it over a big chasm together. My cohort had not only cheered me on, but they’d jumped into the trench with me. And we made it to the other side victorious.

Why?

If this is so hard to get, which it is for everyone, why go through all the blood, sweat, and tears? If everyone’s brain operates this way—interpreting events so swiftly that, consciously, we conflate the interpretation with the event—why not just accept it and move on?

Our interpretations determine both our emotional responses and our actions. If we’re always satisfied with our actions (and reactions), we can just carry on and not concern ourselves with these matters. But if we’d like to react differently or take different actions in the future, we need to understand what’s driving both our emotional responses and our behavior.

The bottom line is that if we want our brain to make a different choice in the future, we first have to modify our mental model. This is called structural neuroplasticity. Otherwise, all the brain has to go on to interpret events is the connections made by our existing mental model; therefore, we are bound to keep getting the same outcomes over and over again.

Check out Something’s Happening Here and What [Else] Is It Telling Me? for additional information. More to come on this topic.

What [Else] Is It Telling Me?

March 25, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In 2018, Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their “discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.”

As a scientist, Allison has pointed out that you can’t really prove anything with science. All you can do is disprove. He says that the data from an experiment may be consistent with your hypothesis, but it might be consistent with another hypothesis, too. So you need to ask, what else is it telling me?

Allison covered similar ground in an interview he gave after winning the Nobel Prize:

[Being a good scientist] takes discipline but [also] creativity, you have got to learn how to view your data as a crystal or something, you know when you look at every facet of it, get to know it from every direction. Look at what it tells you beyond the reason you did the experiment and figure it out. And so I think that’s pretty much it; it is the ability to really study the data and really learn what it is telling you.

As an aside on creativity, Allison is also a musician. He plays harmonica in a band composed of other scientists. This isn’t unusual. It turns out that Nobel Prize laureates are three times more likely than other scientists to have a creative hobby (performing, singing, acting, glassblowing, writing, painting, etc.). You could say they themselves have multiple facets. Knowing that people are Nobel Prize winning scientists doesn’t tell you everything about them.

WYSIATI

I included Allison’s comments at the end of an article on Daniel Kahneman’s concept of WYSIATI or What You See Is All There Is. (Kahneman is another Nobel Prize winner, but I don’t know anything about his hobbies.)

WYSIATI means that when you’re determining the meaning of something or constructing a story about it (i.e. interpreting it), your brain can only use the information available to it at the time. What it sees is all there is. The less information you have, the easier it is for your brain to construct a convincing story. You don’t cast about looking for information you don’t currently possess. What am I likely to be missing? How am I misconstruing this? What else is this information telling me?

Similarly, if the data from an experiment is consistent with your hypothesis, why go looking for trouble by asking if it could be consistent with another hypothesis, too.

The unconscious part of your brain is looking for a good enough answer right now that adequately fits your model of the world. Accuracy is not its highest priority. You need to get a move on. No straggling allowed.

We think we have a clear idea of what’s happening. We think we understand why things happen or happen the way they do. And we feel pretty certain about our assessment of events and situations.

But certainty, like confidence, is a feeling and has nothing to do with the accuracy or lack thereof of our interpretations and beliefs. The more we proceed through life assuming we are correct, the more likely we are to be wrong and the more difficult it becomes to change—our perspectives, our behavior, the trajectory of our lives.

Look at All Facets of an Experience

One way out of this predicament is to ask a lot more questions—not just random questions: hard questions. As a species, we have a unique capacity for self-awareness, but we’re not particularly good at accessing it. As a result:

trying to disentangle our interpretations of events from the events themselves is hard
trying to identify the unconscious beliefs that could underlie our interpretations is even harder
attempting to separate fact from fiction in perceiving events or situations in order to come up with alternative interpretations is extremely hard for some

But if we want different outcomes, if we want to get off the rock we’re on and get on a rock that offers a different perspective, or if we want to think different thoughts, we need to ask the hard questions. We need to be able to explore the facets or components of our experiences and recognize the roles played by our interpretations and our beliefs.

Here’s an exercise to try. But first, some definitions:

An event is something that happens (the data, if you will).
Your interpretation is the meaning you make of the thing that happens.
Beliefs are convictions you have about the nature of reality (the way the world works).

Part One

Describe an event.
Describe your interpretation of the event.
Ask yourself, what is this interpretation telling me about my perception of the way the world works?
Identify one or more beliefs that could underlie your interpretation.

Part Two

Take another look at the event (the data) and ask yourself, what else is it telling me?
Describe two possible alternative interpretations based on the data (facts) of the event.

Part Three

Identify your emotional response to your interpretation of the event and ask yourself, what is it telling me?
Identify the action you took in response to your interpretation of the event and ask yourself, what is it telling me?
Identify your emotional response to the action you took and ask yourself, what is it telling me?

Keep asking yourself what is it telling me? And then what else is it telling me? We can’t access our beliefs directly because they are part of the mental model our brain maintains of what things mean and what is normal for us. But the beliefs that make up our mental model affect our perceptions and interpretations of everything we experience.

We can’t create significant, sustained change unless we change our mental model. In order to do that, we have to learn more about it. We have to be curious. We have to ask the hard questions.

Part two of two parts. Part one is here.

Something’s Happening Here

March 23, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

Something happens. You get a phone call, say, or a friend invites you to a movie—or cancels a movie date—or you wake up on a Monday or a Saturday or from a nap or from being sedated, or you read a news article, or the line at the grocery checkout is longer or shorter than it normally is. Something happens. Anything. Anything at all.

The unconscious part of your brain interprets what happens in order to figure out what it means to you. And it does that so it can determine what action you will take next.

Your brain is predictive, so it was already on the job looking for specific information when the thing that happened—let’s call it an event—occurred. Your brain’s interpretation is instantaneous and presents with a high level of certainty. So much certainty, in fact, that you conflate the interpretation with the event itself. This is automatic.

Your brain formulates its interpretations via the mental model it maintains of what is normal for you, which is based primarily on beliefs you have about the way the world works. It’s easy to conflate the interpretation of an event with the event itself because you believe your experience is an accurate reflection of reality. Almost everyone holds this belief. But experience and reality are not the same thing. Furthermore, our experience is based on our interpretations and not on events themselves.

To recap: something happens and your brain immediately interprets it based on your unconscious beliefs about the way the world works in order to determine an appropriate action to take. The action, like your experience, is based on your brain’s interpretation of the event rather than on the event itself. By the time you become consciously aware of the action you are taking, it’s a done deal.

You may feel that you consciously intended or initiated the action (made the choice to take it), but you did not. That’s not how your brain works. It has to keep making the choice of what to do next. And next. And next. And next. Ordinary consciousness is far too limited to manage that process; all it can do is note some aspects of it after the fact.

Just as your experience and your actions are based on your brain’s interpretations, so are your emotional responses. You likely have an emotional response to your interpretation, as well as to the outcome of your action.

So what you are consciously aware of (whether or not in so many words) are your brain’s interpretations of events, your emotional responses, and the actions you take. What you are not consciously aware of is the beliefs that underlie your brain’s interpretations. In addition, if you’re like most people, you probably find it difficult to separate the facts of events from your interpretations of them.

What’s really amazing about belief is that biologically, what we believe about the world shapes the way our bodies respond to it. —Agustin Fuentes, anthropologist

When our interpretations of what’s going on around us or to us jibe with our beliefs we experience cognitive ease. That makes our brain happy and allows us to continue merrily on our way—no matter if we’re right or if we’re wrong. Of course, all of our interpretations are based on our beliefs, so this ongoing sense of cognitive ease is the usual state of affairs. Whether or not we like what’s going on is beside the point. It’s important to the brain to have a sense of certainty about what’s happening and what caused it to happen. The upshot is that we are not motivated to recognize our interpretations as interpretations rather than accurate representations of reality.

Even on the occasions when our expectations are not met, we rarely take the opportunity to explore the basis of them—or even recognize them as expectations based on interpretations, which in turn are based on beliefs.

This is unfortunate. It’s one of the reasons why transformational change is possible but not probable. But there’s a question we can ask that could change everything.

Part one of two parts.