the psychological payoffs of religion

Religion fills an intriguing niche in human knowledge. Its propositions are accepted despite an objective lack of effective rationales and results. Especially to an unbiased observer who examines every "experimental trial" without the aid of evasive excuses, the tangible impact of religious belief appears to be either indiscernible, ambiguous, or coincidental. Religion's material payoff is unreliable if not worthless. So it raises the question of why anyone pays its great costs.  Two immediate but uninteresting answers are belief by force, due to societal coercion, and belief by habit, due to intellectual inertia or indifference. However, it's obvious that not all followers of religion fall under either of these categories.

Their beliefs must be providing substantive psychological payoffs: subjective and sometimes subtle payoffs that are indeed all in the follower's head. Many easygoing followers have more or less admitted it. Their nonchalant explanation sounds like, "I don't care whether I'm completely correct about the existence of a supernatural realm and its alleged contents. I care about the effects of the beliefs on me. I need the extra framework for my thoughts, feelings, and actions."

Thus, the propositions of religion are intriguing in another way. These entail serious discrepancies with reality yet produce real consequences within followers. In this sense, false propositions can be pragmatic for followers, as odd as that sounds. Critics miss a learning opportunity when they hastily assume the uselessness of disproved or unproved perspectives. For instance, the shift of a human brain into a meditative or prayer-like mode of operation could obtain a real psychological payoff, regardless of the dubious concept of "transcendence". Or symbolic public ceremonies could enable a social group to furnish mutual encouragement and support, regardless of the dubious concept of "worship".

On the other hand, some payoffs are detrimental. All too often, it's despicable to elevate one subgroup's self-esteem by devaluing other subgroups, or to enhance cohesion by despising nonconformity, or to promote purity by irrationally stigmatizing things or activities, or to strengthen certainty by forbidding expressions of doubt. In practice, reality is messy, and religion's degree of value is complex. Perhaps more credit should be given to humane "cultural" followers who extract some of the psychological payoffs of religion but openly deny its pretenses of infallible moral and metaphysical laws.

scattered thoughts about mindfulness meditation

This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. —Yoda

I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.  —Blaise Pascal

SERENITY NOW! —Frank Costanza

I recently began a habit of private mindfulness/insight meditation...solely for the reported benefits to psychological well-being. I'm certainly not purposely pursuing the "insight" or "wisdom" that religious faiths claim to offer. Neither do I assume that age and/or foreignness are proofs of accuracy and/or usefulness. Hence I've only studied two well-known introductions which have a reputation for succinct instructions, customized for contemporary English speakers, rather than supernatural teachings or extraneous concepts: Mindfulness in Plain English and Wherever You Go There You Are.

Yet, for my picky taste, even these contained some occasional comments that were too religious or ethnocentric. I realize the authors' predicament: they're attempting to bridge radically different cultural contexts. Since they portray the source culture's ideas and values as solutions, they can hardly be blamed when they portray some of the destination culture's ideas and values as one-sided problems. They didn't invent the simplistic split into perfect-opposite stereotypes of "Western" and "Eastern", so they can hardly be blamed for invoking it. They're purposely avoiding the foreign words and metaphors in the source culture, so they (mostly Kabat-Zinn) can hardly be blamed for resorting now and then to the typical set of clichés: "psychic", "universe",  "quantum", "inner vision", "soul", "contemplation", "Mother Nature", "mind states", "liberation", "dimension", "expansion", "holistic", "fullness", "deep", "Other", "oneness", "reductionist", "being" (a present participle of "be" in opposition to "doing"). And "energy" as a respectable code word for "mana", which happens to be one of my recurring peeves. They're communicating techniques that were originally embedded in larger viewpoints, so they can hardly be blamed for lapsing into short lectures about the supporting themes of those viewpoints. I know they're trying. I sound like tourists who complain about the strangeness of a setting that they themselves chose to visit.

However, my disbelief in such abstract descriptions doesn't force disbelief in the basic action of mindfulness meditation or of its rewards. (It's one type out of many, but for the remainder of this entry I'll call it "meditation" for short.) I simply employ alternative descriptions that match the best ideas I have about reality—namely, that minds don't have independent existence but are computations of brains. Therefore I consider meditation as a particular activity of my brain matter. As with any pattern of brain activity, repetitions of the pattern train or reinforce it. This will adjust the relative sensitivity of competing brain paths, i.e. learning. On some minor level my brain will function differently, regardless of whether I (or anyone else) label the difference as "freeing my mind". I suspect that a more testable label is "reprogramming my thalamus".

Specifically, my current understanding of meditation is summarized by three interlocking factors: attention, attitude, awareness. In the more-natural mode of the brain, awareness of a notable object produces an associated reaction. That reaction is a shift of attitude into general categories such as attraction or aversion, or pleasure or pain, or affection or aggression. Then that attitude commands attention and narrows or focuses it further, thereby sacrificing everything else in awareness. While the brain is in this mode, appetites and desires of varying sophistication steal attention again and again. Numerous popular metaphors express the cumulative effect: lesser impulse control, greater tunnel vision, egocentrism/selfishness, never-ending search for novelties, failure to see the Big Picture, disregard for long-term consequences, and so on. The defining characteristic of this mode is the hastiness by which perception proceeds from the earlier stage of wider, raw, objective awareness into the later stage of limited, oversimplified, and biased viewpoints.

Unlike this mode, a brain in meditation prolongs the initial stage of greater awareness, minimizes natural demands to deflect attention, and denies the dictates of normal attitudes or instincts. The method is to select a neutral and effortless target and keep it foremost in attention. Each and every time that the meditator notices that their attention wandered, they experience it nonchalantly and disengage from those thoughts. Then they redirect attention back. I followed the authors' advice to meditate on my breath, although I found it easier to sense the slight motions of my chest than air passing through my nostrils.

Indeed, something else the authors make clear is that the chosen target isn't the underlying motivation. The goal is the entire process of experiencing the distractions and then practicing detached reactions to the distractions. Meditation is the development of a skill. As such, the resulting knowledge is in tacit form. Knowledge about the target is much less important than the target's role as a baseline or standard for the task of recognizing distractions. And the more often that distractions are seen and treated as potential ideas instead of irresistible usurpers of all attention, the easier it is for the meditator to maintain sober awareness and carry out voluntary choices with full context, especially under stressful conditions.

In other words, an attitude of detachment is part of meditation. But I needed to rethink some of my misconceptions in order to appreciate it. In this realm, detachment certainly isn't for eliminating all emotions toward everything. To the contrary, the authors eagerly recommend careful cultivation of friendliness and compassion. Neither does it imply permanent isolation and deprivation. Desires don't stop, including generous desires to improve reality and to behave excellently. Detachment is a new style of informed interaction with things and also ideas about things. It's weighing the range of possible motives and ends. Detachment prevents personal preferences from constricting and coloring the flow of information. In so doing it enables more objectivity.

Clearly, the strategy of detachment is less exotic than sometimes thought. It's similar to the sentiment of the saying, "Think twice." It's the consolation of keeping a diary. It's why someone gives themselves time to "cool off" first before continuing a discussion. It's part of the "talking cure" that permits the talker to convert trauma into a verbal form and confront it symbolically. It's visualizing a feared scenario to become desensitized to it. It's avoiding a temptation not by forcibly fleeing it, which gives it too much respect, but by letting the unfulfilled temptation sit and beg until it resigns and fades. The coping mechanisms of many beliefs, faith-based or not, resemble the attitude of detachment.

Nevertheless, the achievement of detachment is much more subtle in meditation. As many ways as there are to think, detachment drops momentarily, attention drifts away from the target altogether, and the lapse itself doesn't enter awareness until the brain has completed a short detour. For instance, I've discovered a few inexpert traps, so I can offer some inexpert commentary and tips—none of which are original, complete, or applicable to everyone.

• lofty expectations: One obvious problem with lofty expectations is predictable disappointment when the expectations aren't met in a short amount of time, which could prompt the hasty decision to quit. But a more sneaky side-effect is an intrusive attitude of anxious expectation. Waiting in suspense for something unusual to happen is a distraction. 
• harsh self-evaluation: Along with lofty expectations for quick payoffs, strict expectations for oneself are also distractions. It's worth reiterating that meditation is about increasing awareness of whatever happens now. If the present task is gently keeping the chosen target in attention, then it's incorrect to fill the present with excessive attention on the failure in the previous moment. The past has passed. It's not necessary to systematically judge "progress". Each moment is another chance, and each chance cannot be either retried nor taken ahead of time. The same truism applies to evaluating the session as a whole. The rest of a session isn't "ruined" by the prior part of it. Paying too much attention to self-frustration is sacrificing the present to pay useless homage to the past.
• forced/labored breathing: Attention to breathing isn't a breathing exercise. A few deep breaths can help initiate calm before starting or restore it after an external interruption, but most of the time breathing should be perceived not consciously ordered. Similarly, close attention to breathing doesn't include thoughts such as images or sounds that are somehow related to breathing. In this case, the target of attention isn't an elaborately constructed daydream of the current meditation session, or the noise of the air movements, or analyses of the respiratory system. The target is, well, the natural sensation of breathing. It's not meant to be puzzling.
• searching: The urge to search for interesting phenomena is incompatible with the relaxed attitude of meditation. According to the old analogy, active investigation is like striding quickly through a stream to find something that sunk to the bottom. Or it's like a questioner whose continual talking interferes with the other speaker's attempts to answer. The searcher's own frantic actions disturb and conceal. Receptiveness is superior to haphazard rechecks.
• narration: Meditation is nonverbal. During the unprocessed stage of unadorned awareness, everything can only be nonsymbolic and impersonal. The corresponding questions "What does X mean?" or "What does X matter to me?" arise in later stages of interpretation. When words appear in thoughts, that's a signal to once again release attention and restore it to the meditation target. It's true that narration represents some degree of detachment, but it's still not ideal. One important exception is some form of counting to help recapture attention, provided the count doesn't continue for too long.
• music: Music is infamous for repeating itself involuntarily in humans' attention, whether or not they're meditating. As usual, the response is to note it, not overreact by fixating on it more, and mildly lift the meditation target back into attention. The volume can be turned down, metaphorically. The music might persist as a murmur. Or subside and resume later. Or transition into some other piece of music. In any case, it's not an opportunity to take a break, and it's not an opponent to wrestle into submission. It's one more item of experience. (The meditator's feeling of annoyance about some music is one more item of experience, too.)  
• boredom/passage of time: Within an unstressed minute, twelve to sixteen breaths commonly occur—approximately four to five seconds for one complete cycle of inhaling, exhaling, and the associated pauses. Breaths are short time periods: 60 or more in five minutes. Observing anything 60 times in succession could produce a feeling of boredom...despite the many unintentional breaks that are sprinkled throughout a beginner's meditation. Again, the root issue is distraction from the chosen target's existence in the present alone. The target isn't all 52 preceding breaths or all 52 following breaths. It's the current breath, no matter its level of uniqueness. In the same way, anxiety about time consumption presumes concern about a wider gap of time, as well as compulsive rescheduling. If the session is happening in a block of time reserved for it ahead of time, perhaps with an alarm to mark the end, then it's fruitless to worry about taking up time for everything else. A schedule with genuine reservations of time should enable the meditator to relax about the passage of time. Anybody can just take reservations. Really, the most important part of the reservation is holding it. That's why someone has reservations: to not run out of a finite quantity like time.
• body drooping/movement: Meditation and relaxation are symbiotic but not synonymous. Meditative awareness implies constant vigilance. The intent of the customary postures is stillness without rigidity and without drowsiness. Drooping is an indicator that meditation might be changing into partial sleep. In that mode, everything appears less vivid, including the target. On the other hand, moving around too frequently can be a trap. One movement leads to more movements, then more after that. Meditation exposes the sheer variety of habitual superfluous movements such as tilting the head, licking the lips, stretching the back, and so on. Indulging in one invites the others.
• thought replacement: One primitive form of human self-regulation is passionately striving to think about something else. But that's not meditation (or not this kind). Its characteristic attitude is identified as weightless, quick, nonjudgmental, unassuming, broad-minded, unselfish, serene, positive, open. Paradoxical or not, detachment is acceptance. It's not declaring that everything is good but withholding an impromptu or mindless declaration of whether anything is good or bad. It's watching a thought and then not replacing it forcefully but nimbly returning attention to the target, which never vanished in the meantime. It's realizing that the gamut of the brain's inventive output isn't always accurate or useful. And also that, by introducing sufficient feedback loops via training like meditation, humans can more effectively recognize and circumvent the worst tendencies, if they so choose.

the pragmatism triangle

My opinion is that philosophical pragmatism observes and recommends the indispensable triangle of 1. thoughts, 2. actions, and 3. realities.

• (1 and 2) The meaning of thoughts is demonstrated by the resulting actions. Thoughts guide actions. Without discernible effects on actions, thoughts are suspect. Actions are clues about which thoughts really matter, as opposed to which thoughts are hollow or superficial aspirations. Also, actions are the means both to test the accuracy of new thoughts through experimentation and to discover new thoughts through investigation.
• (1 and 3) By the basic nature of humanity in the universe, realities are mediated by thoughts. In so doing, preexisting thoughts embellish realities through interpretation, bias, emphasis, and interpolation. On the other hand, realities lead to honest revisions of thoughts. Through the detection of regularities and patterns, as well as exceptions, realities are the raw material of deeper and larger thoughts that can be reapplied to make predictions or to explain the present or past.  
• (2 and 3) Of course, actions are how realities change. But realities might resist or counter actions and thereby throw doubt on the level of realism that backs those actions. 

biology and information theory

One sign of a highly technical theory's influence and profundity is the improbable attention it receives in seemingly unrelated if not inappropriate contexts. Information theory certainly qualifies. Unfortunately one of these peripheral contexts is abstract arguments against biology.

The argument based on information theory follows the template of a more popular argument based on the Second Law of the theory of thermodynamics: "Biology cannot increase in orderly complexity because the Second Law states that disorder increases over time." The variant using information theory is "Biology cannot increase in orderly complexity because information theory states that the result of random modifications of an orderly message is nothing more than an unintelligible message. These random modifications are the noise of the corresponding information channel, and the noise reduces its optimal information rate."

However, the intuitive appeal of either argument relies on ignorance of the extraordinary scale of biology's abundant populations and prolonged time periods. Regardless of an event's slim probability, a sufficiently massive number of trials actually implies that it's more likely that the event will happen. In merely 13 die rolls, the probability of never rolling 6 is less than 1 in 10. Perhaps many biological changes are destructive like the metaphors of thermodynamic disorder or noisy information, and the candidates that experience those changes are worse-off. Yet the multitude of candidate organisms throughout epochs can still yield the event of a comparatively rare constructive change, and thereafter the change spreads through reproduction of that singular beneficiary. (Although according to the, y'know, facts, occasionally the constructive events have indeed occurred too rarely to compensate for rapid changes in circumstances—mass extinctions.)

Furthermore, this application of information theory prompts more questions. If it were accurate to analyze biology as an information channel in which all organisms were messages, and all modifications to organisms were noise, then how would the first noise-free organisms originate? Presumably from "The Great Communicator"...but the usual name for theoretical message senders is "Alice". Assuming all the first organisms were perfectly communicated messages from Alice, then later organisms could only have become more noisy or less perfect. Isn't this implied distinction between "message" and "noise" so narrow that it verges on nonsensical? Given all the actual differences between the first organisms and organisms in the present, is it apt for all these differences to qualify as increases in noise, i.e. always relative degradation? Is it accurate to suppose that every grandparent were a more precise expression of Alice's original message than every grandchild? Are the implications of this proposition consistent with human interactions with reality? In other words, is it true in the pragmatic sense?

In contrast, real biology's ambiguity of "message" and "noise" is closer to something else in information theory. Extreme information ambiguity is a defining feature of the unbreakable encryption strategy of a one time pad. The "pad" itself contains a long encryption key that's strongly random: no portion of the key/pad can be calculated from any other portion. Then sequential portions of this key are used to encrypt sequential small portions of a message. In effect, the key from the pad acts like the worst possible kind of communication noise. The key's "noise" affects each small portion of the message and the "noise" is always unpredictably different for each. It's like sending numerous tiny encrypted "micro-messages" and using a separate independent key for each micro-message. This is secrecy by brute-force. Hence the strength of this strategy is also its weakness. The large quantity of random and therefore incompressible key information must itself be exchanged over a sufficiently secure and efficient channel. But if a superior channel meets these requirements then it should communicate the message instead! (The strategy could still be appropriate if the superior channel for the key, e.g. handing over a literal pad in-person in the past, differs from the inferior channel for the secret message, e.g. series of short radio broadcasts in the future.)

Consequently, depending on how closely biological information matches the metaphor of a one time pad, nobody should be surprised by the difficulty of disentangling its "messages" from its "noise". Inquisitive humans are the interceptors of the channel. The recipient of the channel is the organism, and the sender of the channel is the organism's ancestor(s). The biological information has flowed over a staggering number of channels or generations. In doing so, it has absorbed noise coming from an ever-changing key on the one time pad commonly known as the universe.

At the same time, the environment of the organism is ever-changing. This means that the definition of sensible biological information is also ever-changing, since biological information is sensible insofar as it corresponds successfully to an environment—oxygen-breathing organisms aren't sensible in an oxygen-deprived environment. Unlike the phantasmal perfection of first organisms communicated by a non-biological Alice, this concept of environmental sensibility is inescapably relative and limited. Metaphorically speaking, the "message" consists of biological information with environmental sensibility, and the rest is "noise". Due to environmental changes, the same bits of biological information can change from message to noise and back. Correct answers cease to be correct when the questions transform.

The inherent uncertainty of a one time pad forces an ignorant interceptor to admit that any possible message could result in any possible encrypted message. The one time pad causes the sender's input message to diverge into a random output message. In the context of restrictive human communication, the recipient is displeased by receiving any other message than the sender's. But in the context of biology, a descendant organism that receives innovative information could thereby surpass the ancestor in the broad criterion of environmental sensibility, if only by a little. To use an overstretched analogy, this biological case is more like a sender who sent the message "The meeting is at 3:30," and then the message changed along the way to "The meeting is at 3:00"...while the meeting was rescheduled to 3:15 anyway.

the Dumbo feather of ethics

Often, deep discussions about religion handle it as a collection of otherworldly ideas. But these necessary discussions seem irrelevant to many believers. They don't value religion primarily because of the many confusing details of its ideas, which they may not study seriously anyway (angels on pins, anyone?). They value religion because of its pragmatic impact on their everyday lives. They view religion as a cultural tool for specific purposes. Like pounding nails with a rock, the adequate usefulness of a tool like religion overpowers legitimate concerns about the tool's deficiencies.

In particular, throughout the history of civilization, religions have been tools for the encouragement of good behavior. As long as the religion was "proper", few objected to this traditional assignment. Even nonconformist writers, who mostly ignored religion in their own lives, nevertheless assumed that religiosity was essential to the ethical training of the lowly and bestial majority of society. Within prisons, clergy were welcomed as possible rehabilitation tools. In twelve step behavior modification programs such as "______ Anonymous" religiosity was one of the original tools. Schools included religion classes as tools for character development. Parents with religious childhoods, who may have stopped believing long ago, used churches as tools to ensure that their children absorbed the "right" cultural heritage with the corresponding baseline of behavioral expectations.

By contrast, a self-consistent atheistic perspective cannot link good behavior and the questionable ideas of religions. However, breaking the link implies a surprising compliment to the religious humans who consistently exhibit good behavior—who are good whether or not their religion's predominant morality agrees with them (perhaps they respond to the difference by creating a secondary form that's "reinterpreted" or "modernized" or "reformed"). If religiosity isn't a vital factor in their good behavior, then via process of elimination the vital factor is always them. The atheist can't give credit to their gods or to their religions. They may say that they're acting as an appendage of a divine compassionate being or that they're fueled by supernatural love. But the atheist must jump to the less far-fetched conclusion: they're just decent humans...who also are too hasty to accept statements about the existence of gods.

Consequently, the supposed religious basis of good behavior is instead a placebo illusion which yields imaginary additional moral fiber. It's ineffective apart from the believer's thoughts. It's akin to the trick feather in the movie Dumbo that the titular elephant holds while flying (tvtropes.org has alternative examples). Ultimately Dumbo realizes that the feather is a deception; Dumbo can fly without it. Similarly, to blame religion for genuine ethical motivation and determination is to act like Dumbo. Like Dumbo and the feather, genuinely ethical believers could be ethical without their religion. Religion can be a container or setting for describing ethics, but humane ethics aren't limited by it.

In reality, of course, modern decision-makers with faith-beliefs cannot face all modern ethical decisions through overstretched comparisons to ancient religious stories. That's why the more honest ones tend to mention "timeless principles" extracted from the religion, since the "raw" form contains ethical problems like toleration of slavery, religious-warfare, and inequality of all varieties. Religion is the Dumbo feather of ethics. It might be a helpful educational tool at first. Yet the one clinging to it is the real origin of all of its illusory ethical power. They cannot avoid ethical responsibility.

only bad witches are ugly

The title of this entry is a famous quote from The Wizard Of Oz. Yes, I realize it's awful to spread the idea that goodness is correlated with beauty. But that's not today's topic.

Today's topic is the logic of sets. When a witch says "only bad witches are ugly", which meaning is she communicating in regard to which witches are in which sets? She means that for any witch in the "ugly" set, that witch is also in the set of "bad". This implies that the ugly witches are a subset of the bad witches. Membership in the ugly set is always accompanied by membership in the bad set. Also, any witch that is not bad (good) is therefore not ugly (beautiful); for they could only be ugly if they were also bad.

But the more notable distinction is what the witch isn't claiming about these sets. The witch said nothing certain about whether all beautiful witches are good. All she told us is that each ugly witch is bad. That doesn't contradict the possibility of a beautiful witch who is also bad. Not all the bad witches are necessarily ugly. It's like a deck of playing cards. Each heart is a red card. But that doesn't mean all the red cards are hearts.

In related news, Oz the Great and Powerful has some slow-paced sections that might cause theater-goers' thoughts to wander.

ill-fitting realities

"It doesn't matter whether it works for you. It works for me." Some thoughts are expected to differ because the thinkers differ. These thoughts are like shirts. Each thinker peruses the rack of various optional thoughts, picks one, tries it on, and finally integrates it into their ensemble. In broad terms the goal is to achieve a suitable fit for the shape and style of prior thoughts.

The name of this category is personal preference. From a pragmatic perspective, two of its essential characteristics are extremely limited: its range and its verification methods. Specifically, the range of personal preference is only the person, and the verification methods are only the person's mental "work". The personal preference of one human doesn't apply elsewhere, and the human is the one witness of it (firsthand). In effect personal preference entails an exceptionally narrow definition of applicability or truthfulness.

However, for any number of reasons, some commentators adore the category of personal preference (they personally prefer personal preference?). As often as possible, they lump inappropriate propositions into it, perhaps to avoid further discussion. "My proposition doesn't fit you? Then we'll treat it as a personal preference and move on."

Nevertheless, their botched classification will show up in practice. Regardless of how poorly it fits a particular human's preferences, it can also be verified repeatedly by impersonal methods. At this point, a reasonable pragmatist judges that the proposition isn't a "personal preference" but an ill-fitting reality. Its incidental discomfort to a human doesn't override the firm clues coming from the alternative methods of verification.

Many examples of ill-fitting realities are obvious and unavoidable. To complain about one is to make a joke, because everyone already knows it's futile to pretend that personal preference constantly affects the real motions of the rest of the universe. "The weather forecast we've been given is awful, in my opinion. I'd like to return it." "Of all the days for my car to have sudden engine trouble. This is unacceptable to me." "I collided with him as I danced carelessly. How dare he throw off my groove." (Of course some personal preferences, i.e. brain signals, eventually trigger bodily actions that in turn affect matter outside oneself, including actions as minimal as a change in facial expression.)

Not all ill-fitting realities are as easy to identify, but the level of abstraction is irrelevant to the underlying principle. Mystical propositions aren't exempt. It's reasonable to continue to demand methods of verification which are consistent, coherent, and feasible. Any proposition is truthful to the degree that its corresponding methods of verification yield sufficient results.

Furthermore, if the proposition is so insubstantial that it's more or less isolated from most realities of the universe, then personal preference could be the solitary remaining data-point behind it. Pragmatically speaking, such propositions are indeed personal preferences of scant meaningfulness. For instance, these conditions might hold for the mystical proposition of a singular unknown plan guiding the universe, namely "Fate". If every actual event is always in accordance with Fate, then Fate is pragmatically indistinguishable from Fate's logical opposite of nonexistence, namely "Not-Fate". Therefore the airy concept of Fate is untethered from earthy minutiae. The basis for accepting it is personal preference. If either Fate or Not-Fate fits someone's brain, they may wear it.

The conflict arises after the believer tries to attach more details to Fate. Once they do, Fate ceases to be compatible with every actual event...theoretically, at least. On the presumption that it's Fate for Marvin and Marcie to be in a romantic relationship, their breakup throws doubt on how well Fate corresponds to the reality of their broken relationship. On the presumption that it's Fate for Marvin or Marcie to work in factories that manufacture videotapes, their loss of employment throws doubt on how well Fate corresponds to the reality of their employment elsewhere (or unemployment). On the presumption that it's Fate for their children to earn incomes at around the 33% percentile of the working population, their children's income at around 80% throws doubt on how well Fate corresponds to the reality of their income. These or any other "violations" indicate that Not-Fate could be an ill-fitting reality...to those who feel that Fate fits them better.

The upshot is that generalizable propositions typically venture outside the tiny range of personal preference. It's not sensible to treat these like simple personal preferences, despite the all-too-human urge to quickly reject ill-fitting thoughts. "The idea works for me" doesn't even satisfy pragmatism's easy standard when "works" really means "matches my wishes" rather than means "matches ideas with proven correspondences to realities". In that case a pragmatist may reply that the speaker is under the mistaken impression that the idea works for them; future interactions with an ill-fitting reality could demonstrate in what way the impression turns out to be mistaken.

Wither and Frost

In the category of fiction by C.S.Lewis, the idiosyncratic That Hideous Strength doesn't place highly on most lists. Yet this wordy novel for adults encapsulates the author's recurring interests and opinions, and it expresses those ideas in a more engrossing way than his nonfiction. (I admit that his nonfiction became much, much less compelling after I dismissed my faith-beliefs.) This story contains a startling juxtaposition of collegiate/organizational politics, science fiction, medieval fantasy, classical mythology, study of language, and of course Christianity.

It contains two opposing sides engaged in an unequivocal struggle between Good and Evil. The Good side is aligned with benevolent celestial spirits and its culture and morality is traditional (more or less...). The Evil side is aligned with malignant terrestrial spirits and its culture and morality is a parade of horrors intertwined with amoral science and unhinged progressiveness. By the way, neither side is committed to a convincing ethic of human equality or democracy; it seems both Good and Evil demand their underlings to know and follow their preassigned roles. I should point out that the start is slow and semi-realistic, yet the characters and the events are increasingly bizarre as the plot proceeds. The outrageous climax is a quite literal deus ex machina. In one scene, a character writes propaganda articles for newspapers. In another scene, the omniscient narrator peeks briefly into the perspective of a bear.

The Evil side takes the form of an impersonal juggernaut of unrestrained power called the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments. At its deepest level, it's steered by two remarkable antagonists whose surnames are Wither and Frost. Naturally, they're two of the most memorable characters. These portraits of villainy are prime starting-points for dissecting some of the favorite themes of Lewis. As much as possible, I'll try to digest his mere (ha!) theology into standalone nuggets of insight.

Wither. 

Wither is the Deputy Director, the top day-to-day authority of the organization (and one of his unwritten duties is to neutralize the clueless official chief!). However, he wields his power in an unexpected manner: his leadership and communication style is astonishingly vague. He's not openly tyrannical in the slightest. He explicitly instructs his inferiors to act with "elasticity", i.e. serve how they can without conforming to limited job descriptions. He's easily irritated if anyone coerces him to act or speak bluntly. He meanders with his voice, extending his conversations with excessive courtliness until the other participant is worn-down. He also meanders on foot, walking around the organization grounds with no warning of his approach and no planned destination. He's usually friendly and polite to someone's face. Nevertheless, he expects all of his euphemistic "requests" to be obeyed without hesitation in order to prevent him from demonstrating his "hurt" at being ignored.

Wither is an example of someone whose public face is so well-developed that his personality is virtually split into pieces. His habitual mimicry of courtesy is so complete that he feels no need to direct his entire attention to his job. His mask is himself. The disconnected part of him that runs the machine-like organization is itself machine-like. Therefore Wither exhibits two related problems of human nature that Lewis highlighted multiple times.

1) Wither's interactions with others are insincere. For Lewis, insincerity wasn't a harmless social game. It was an insidious path of temptation to the greater problem of self-delusion. Through self-delusion, humans avoid acknowledging their actual motives and thereby also avoid acknowledging their camouflaged innermost "evils". They convince themselves that they're virtuous when even their virtue is underpinned by their beloved flaws. Furthermore, insincerity in society leads to shallow relationships built on passive-aggressive pretenses. Lewis recognized that pride and hatred have as many subtle expressions as love. Regardless of whether someone is religious, these are valuable observations and warnings about human deceptiveness. Sincerity and honesty in communities, including the "community" within a single brain, are values that are tied to the earnest pursuit of truth—a universal humanistic value.

2) On the other hand, perhaps Wither's outward insincerity is a surprisingly accurate reflection of a worse root problem, namely self-disintegration. Perhaps Wither no longer maintains a coherent and unified self-concept, so his thoughts and actions are a mass of contradictions. In that case his blathering managerial persona isn't lying when it gives the false impression that Wither is compassionate; while it's active that persona is being truthful about its own sentiments. Lewis identified disorder as a major characteristic of the natural human state. He emphasized the inborn tendency to drift away from an established idea. Without sustained training and effort, humans lose control over their spontaneous competing impulses. They're prodded to rebel against their ideals, no matter what those ideals happen to be. According to Lewis, the long-term inability or unwillingness to assert self-control eventually produces a pitiful result, when the original tendency toward disorder culminates in full-blown self-disintegration. At that point of no return, the human has ceased to be a unified decision-maker in any meaningful sense. There isn't a brain "executive" that issues overriding directives, or if there is then the executive doesn't retain power of command.

Lewis' intent behind this theme was to claim, "If you refuse to accept the rule of Christianity then you cannot rule yourself successfully." Apart from this abominable non sequitur, his cautionary notion of self-disintegration is valid enough. The human brain is packed full of multitudes of parallel energy-expending neural networks that show subconscious activity. And habits have physical form in these networks. So it's not far-fetched to notice that the subjective experience of consciousness is torn by inner conflicts which demand considerable mediation—"cognitive dissonance" is the preferred label for it. Moreover, it's also not far-fetched to notice that frequency  of activation affects the talkativeness of particular networks. Humans who don't "exercise" advanced brain functions, such as imagining future repercussions, certainly can't expect those functions to "win out" during decisions. Self-disintegration is a creeping danger to anyone who wants to live in consistent accordance with their chosen ideals, independent of how they choose to derive their ideals. Pragmatically speaking, cheap ideals without the verification of steady commitment barely deserve to be called "real".

Frost. 

Frost is more secretive. He mostly works in private, but he gains greater and greater prominence as the story unveils the sinister mainspring of the Institute. He's disciplined, direct, abrupt, and severe. Whereas Wither appears to be welcoming and harmless, Frost appears to be cold and menacing. When the two of them converse, he complains about Wither's roundabout speaking, emotional word-choice, and reliance on patient strategies. He's keen on stoic allegiance as opposed to camaraderie. Wither's face sometimes looks lifeless, while Frost's stony face (his eyes concealed by the light falling on his pince-nez glasses) sometimes looks empty of every shred of humanity. And his smile makes the effect worse.

Frost personifies an attempt by Lewis to create a reductio ad absurdum of one of his perennial grievances, "Subjectivism". Subjectivism, as described by Lewis, is the general belief that the qualities or values of objects arise from the observers but not the objects. That is, objects don't embody qualities. For example, when a diligent florist says, "My flower is beautiful," Lewis asserts that Subjectivism interprets the statement as a pure fact about the florist and nothing substantial about the flower. He argues for the opposite idea of object qualities which definitely exist, whether or not human judges agree. His frank concern is that if humans begins to think that these qualities are solely subjective, then they'll doubt the "real" existence of those qualities...with the dreaded final outcome of humans such as Frost who devalue those qualities altogether.

Subjectivism is Frost's philosophy and lifestyle, but it's implied that Frost was taught by a diabolical source. He in turn wishes to initiate others. Thus he gives several lectures on his beliefs. He insists that all emotions are "nothing more" than chemical/biological phenomena, so he encourages intentional rejection of the entire set of illusions. He preaches that feelings and the associated moral judgments are unnecessary impairments to clearheaded analysis and swift action. His ends always justify his means. In effect he's a Sociopath With A Cause, or an ideal pawn for his "dark masters". Part of his unforgettable training method is to systematically provoke revulsion in order to guide his initiates to ignore their instinctual biases.

Nowadays the entire topic puzzles me a little. Dramatizations aside, I don't feel threatened by Subjectivism. My response to it is analogous to my response to the charge of relativism. Subjectivism is a simpleminded caricature. Yes, I'm a heretic who believes that humane ideals are constructed by humans. At the same time, I reject the hasty conclusion that human-constructed ideals are defined without exception by the petty competitive interests of individuals or tribes (or voting blocs?). Given the human capability to develop and apply other sophisticated ideas, ideals could and do achieve the same sophistication. Ideals aren't constrained by originating and then existing within subjects.

But an objector may sputter, "You're missing the main point. Isn't this a blueprint for disaster? If things aren't inherently good or bad or pretty or ugly or prudent or foolish, then subjects could disagree!"

The pragmatist replies, "Yup." It's a pragmatic truth that subjects disagree often about countless objects. Perhaps they agree about the attractiveness of the proud florist's flower. Perhaps not. In either case, the subjectivity of the flower's attractiveness is inconsequential. Just as human subjects construct thoughts about objects, they select which subjective differences matter to them. (I suspect their reactions to the flower matter more to the florist.)

In more important cases like some behavioral ideals, humans feel that every subject should agree. They can accomplish that goal through the many methods that suffice for any sophisticated ideas. To start, they could explain, persuade, and debate. In cases of still-greater importance like bans of despicable acts, humans feel that every subject must agree. Hence they resort to enforcement and various deterrents.

Fortunately, a second pragmatic truth about real-world subjectivity intervenes. Since all humans are linked by common descent and the members of each cultural group are linked by common training during immaturity, most subjects agree about an interrelated collection of vital basics. Human subjectivity has a shared frame of reference, especially in the context of a homogeneous culture. This second truth is a clue for why the objectors to Subjectivism too readily assume that all of the subjective occurrences in their brains are "really" attributes of the objects. They're heavily adapted to their own frame of reference. (If they ever bother to refer to it they may use the unhelpful term "common sense".) Their ingrained subjectivity isn't distinguished from genuine objectivity.

I concede that, to his credit, Lewis sometimes alludes to the significant disparities among individuals and distinct cultures, although he repeatedly emphasizes every similarity he can find. Unlike me, he doesn't interpret these similarities as supporting evidence for a species-wide, deep-rooted evolutionary explanation. Indeed he jumps to the opposite explanation of a singular divine Moral Law imposed on every human soul; he opines that the discrepancies spring out of a universal urge to discard or replace portions of the Law.

Presumably, the threat of those possible rewrites of ideals are why Lewis thought that Subjectivism should be frightening. To the contrary, I now see that the refinement of ideals is a strength. Subjectivism is scary whenever subjects cannot be trusted, but humans have stumbled on effective pragmatic solutions to the problem of trustworthiness. The refinement of ideals can be treated carefully, i.e. democratically and peacefully and thoughtfully. In any case it's better than having ideals that never improve because of faux objectivity: "That's just the way it is."

a curious pair of political beliefs

• Greater legal restrictions on guns will have no effect whatsoever on actual gun activity. Unlawful citizens will still perform illegal gun violence.
• Greater legal restrictions on abortions will effectively eliminate actual abortion activity. Unlawful citizens will never perform illegal abortion procedures.

I know many voters who profess to both of the preceding political beliefs. How curious.

retcons

"Retcon" or retroactive continuity is the attempt to modify the previously established "facts" of fiction. Perhaps the best-known case is the unplanned return of a dead popular character by portraying an unlikely scenario of survival or death-by-subterfuge. In the all-too-common case of several writers who create works containing statements that are in stark conflict, the retcon is the tricky solution that explains how every work can be "right". Of course, a retcon could also be necessary for the works of a single writer who changed their thinking over a long period of time, so their earlier works contain general statements that don't match up with later works. The most impressive and least confusing retcons achieve a specific goal through as few modifications as possible.

On the other hand, the inevitable complexity of an innovative retcon can be exasperating to those who aren't deeply absorbed in the details. "Who cares about little inconsistencies?" they may ask. "Everyone already knows that none of it is real." And their response almost answers itself. The inconsistencies are toxic because good fiction is experienced like an alternate reality, and no reality can be filled with inconsistencies. Human brains fixate naturally on inconsistencies for survival; inconsistencies could be signs of danger. Thus inconsistencies draw attention away from the meaningful aspects of the fiction.

More importantly, a form of "retcon" appears in intellectual schemes for explaining this reality, too. As we discover, observe, and learn, we must revise prior interpretations, sometimes in disturbing directions. Unlike in fiction, these retcons change the analysis of facts rather than the facts. (Except when we prove that past "facts" were obtained via incorrect methods such as idiotic statistical assumptions or flawed procedures.) Retcons of human thoughts about reality are milestones on the path to greater accuracy of understanding.

Hence it's worthwhile to evaluate human thoughts accordingly. We should start to question the accuracy of the scheme itself...

• if it consumes a virtually unlimited supply of complicated retcons in order to stay relevant 
• if it's packed with unhelpful extraneous items that require retcons in order to not be problematic 
• if it's sufficiently bizarre that retcons are indispensable to bring it into harmony with the rest of human knowledge
• if it's stretched thin not strengthened by retcons, leading to retcons of retcons of retcons

It's easy to guess what I'm hinting toward. Which intellectual schemes have the preceding characteristics...and thereby display a notable kinship with retcon-dependent works of fiction?