Threshold Concepts Archives

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!

The Map Is Not the Territory

December 13, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

And the menu is not the meal. In other words, beware of confusing models of reality with reality. It sounds obvious, but it’s much easier said than done, so we end up believing a lot of things that are just not true.

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

There’s a handful of threshold concepts that can shed some light on how we might know ourselves (or think we do) and how we might know others (or think we do)—and cause us to consider the possibility that we might be wrong about how we do both.

In and of themselves, threshold concepts are both transformative and irreversible. Once you fully grasp them, your understanding of what underlies your experience, your perception, and your behavior will be transformed. Once you cross the threshold from not knowing to knowing, you will no longer be able to view yourself, others, or the world the way you did before.

Threshold concepts are inherently difficult to grasp.

That’s why these concepts are considered to be troublesome knowledge. They’re troublesome because they conflict with preexisting beliefs, they are counterintuitive and disconcerting, and/or they seem illogical. They don’t slip easily into the mental architecture most of us have already constructed. In fact, they often bounce right off. So they bear repeating…repeatedly. (Recently someone said she had probably heard me mention a particular threshold concept a hundred times, but it was just in that moment that she got it.)

Each of these concepts is important individually, but many of them connect with and relate to each other. That’s another aspect of threshold concepts: they are integrative.

One

The brain is not wired to experience reality as it is. That’s troublesome because it’s counterintuitive and conflicts with our belief that we experience an objective reality. But the interior of the brain is a dark, silent space, in which the primary activity is the interpretation of electrical impulses to give us a sense of what is going on inside and outside of us.

Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain. —Chris Frith, neuropsychologist

There is a real world. But you’ve never lived there. You haven’t been there even for a visit. —Susana Martinez-Conde, neuroscientist

Two

The brain operates on autopilot approximately 95% of the time, which means System 1 (the unconscious) directs most of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. That’s troublesome because our experience is that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are consciously determined. But consciousness can only process 40 bits of information at a time, while the unconscious process 11 million bits at a time.

If we were forced always to consider every aspect of the situation around us and had to weigh all our options about what to do, humankind would have died out long ago. —Timothy D. Wilson, social psychologist

It can take huge amounts of time for our conscious brain to think about every scenario deliberately. Everyday life requires us to suspend rationality, to be mindless about countless risks. —Shankar Vedantam, journalist and host of The Hidden Brain podcast

Three

The brain is predictive rather than reactive. It focuses on determining what’s going to happen next so it can figure out ahead of time what action to take instead of waiting for something to happen and then deciding what to do about it. That’s troublesome because, once again, our experience is that, moment-to-moment, we are making conscious or intentional decisions based on our conscious perceptions.

Your brain is wired to ask the question, “The last time I was in a situation like this, what sensations did I encounter and how did I act?” —Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist and psychologist

Our primary contact with the world…is via our expectations about what we are about to see or experience. —Andy Clark, cognitive philosopher

Four

The brain pays far more attention to what we do than to what we feel, what we think, or what we think about doing. This is troublesome because we tend to believe that the brain is for thinking and perceiving—I think, therefore I am, as Rene Descartes famously said—and not for figuring out what action to take. We also expect there to be a more direct correlation than there is between what we think about doing (intend) and the action we ultimately take.

Our brains interpret the world primarily as a forum for action and only secondarily as a realm of facts. —Colin G. DeYoung, psychologist

The course of an individual’s life is determined by the action she takes in the world. —Gabrielle Oettingen, psychologist

Five

The brain generates a mental model of the world that represents what’s normal for each of us both internally and externally. Our model of the world determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and the meaning we assign to it. That’s troublesome because we have the sense that we directly perceive what is available for us to perceive, when in fact we perceive everything through our unique filters.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman, neuroscientist

When we experience things as being real, we are less able to appreciate that our perceptual worlds may differ from those of others. —Anil K. Seth, neuroscientist

We Ought to Be Less Certain…

In attempting to know ourselves, we’re faced with the same problems we encounter when attempting to know anyone else.

For one thing, we have no direct access to either our unconscious or the unconscious of anyone else, even though that’s the part of the brain that runs us most of the time. For another, just about every perception we have had or will have is an interpretation. We are interpreting ourselves just as we are interpreting others. And those interpretations, generated by internal or external cues, are based on our individual mental model of the world, which means they are all highly subjective and necessarily distorted.

Furthermore, we’re literally living in the past, since our predictive (autopilot) brain has already determined the nature of a situation and initiated the appropriate response before we’re consciously aware a response is called for.

In spite of all this, we have a strong, if false, sense of certainty about who we are, who others are and what they are experiencing, as well as our overall experience of being in the world.

…and More Curious

The best way to get a remotely objective clue as to who we—or someone else might be—is to pay attention to what we or they do, note our interpretation of the action, and attempt to reason backward. What might that behavior indicate about me or Joe or Olivia? What belief or character/personality trait might that reflect? What don’t I know? What other explanations could there be?

There’s no guarantee we’ll come up with the correct answer, of course. But curiosity gives us some room to maneuver, to question our assumptions and interpretations instead of merrily running off a cliff with them.

Know Thyself (or Not)

December 6, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Know Thyself is the first of three maxims inscribed at the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi and the one everybody remembers. Fairly succinct at just two words, it’s loaded, nonetheless. It’s difficult, impossible even, to pin down who said what when or the specific meaning that was intended by the ancient Greeks. And Pythia, aka the Oracle at Delphi, was known to be cryptic, so no help there.

Looking at know thyself now, I’m reminded again of listening to a philosopher expound on the meaning of the word is for what seemed an inordinate amount of time. Know is similar in that regard.

It can mean, for example, that I fully grasp or understand something; that I am—or more likely, I feel—certain about something; that I have a working acquaintance with some process, thing, concept, etc.; that I’ve memorized something; that I recognize someone or something, or that I can make distinctions—among other things.

Thyself is a similar kettle of fish since it both assumes a sense of self and implies that each of us is a single self—which, in the latter case, is not the case.

So I don’t know what know thyself is supposed to mean or can mean. Once upon a time, I probably thought I knew. But as I’ve been reflecting recently, I understand more and more that I understand less and less. This seems to be a logical outcome of learning.

To know that one does not know is best; not to know but to believe that one knows is a disease. —Lao Tzu

It’s so Meta

Stephen Fleming has written a book titled Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. From the bits I’ve read, he appears to consider self-awareness and metacognition to be essentially the same thing.

Self-awareness could be defined as having knowledge of one’s own traits, feelings, motivations, behaviors, etc. (This ought to ring some bells.)

Metacognition could be defined as thinking about our own mental processes—or thinking about thinking.

Self-awareness is meta even without the prefix. Both terms describe System 2 (higher order) processes or functions. I haven’t determined whether there’s a significant distinction between them or the extent to which they overlap or converge.

At any rate, Fleming, who is a cognitive neuroscientist and a very good writer, penned a fascinating article on Theory of Mind. In the entire 4,200+ word article, there was not a single reference to the concept of empathy. That’s because he was writing about the possibility that we know our own minds (or don’t know them) in the same manner and to the same extent that we know other minds. And there’s plenty of room for improvement all around.

I Think, Therefore I Am

Rene Descartes thought that we humans have privileged access to information about ourselves and that we can’t be wrong about what we perceive.

I know clearly that there is nothing that can be perceived by me more easily or more clearly than my own mind.

This is still a pretty popular view of things, even though it is obviously incorrect. We most certainly can be wrong about ourselves, and we certainly can and do lack self-knowledge. (If that were not the case, there would be no need for the What Do You Want? course. Everyone would automatically know what they want.)

Another philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, had a different take:

The sorts of things that I can find out about myself are the same as the sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same.

So, from the perspective of what is known as the inferential view, we don’t need one explanation (privileged access) for how we know ourselves and another (Theory of Mind) for how we know others. Furthermore, the methods we employ to know—or not know—ourselves and others are the same methods we employ to know anything about anything else in the world. What are the implications? And what do you think some of those methods might be?

Another Threshold

I would like to be able to say (maybe) that I intended all along to get to this point, but I’ve simply been following the breadcrumb trail, and it has inexorably led to the threshold concept* that happens to be the focus of December’s Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain):

The brain generates a mental model of the world, which determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and the meaning we assign to it.

Our mental models of the world, which circumscribe every aspect of our present experience, as well as what is possible for us to do and be, are not simply abstract concepts; they are encoded in the brain.

More next time on the impact a handful of threshold concepts might have on how we know ourselves or others.

*A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. —Jan Meyer and Ray Land, 5/4/03