Saturday, September 23, 2017

what compartments?

For good reason, compartmentalization is considered to be a typical description for how a lot of people think. This means that they have isolated compartments in their minds for storing the claims they accept. Each claim is strictly limited to that suitable area of relevance. Outside its area it has no effect on anything, and nothing outside its area has any effect on it. Imprisoning claims in closed areas frees them to be as opposite as night and day. None are forced to simply be thrown out, and none are allowed to inconveniently collide.

The cost is that defining and maintaining the fine distinctions can be exhausting sometimes. But the reward is a complex arrangement that can be thoroughly comprehended, productively discussed, and flexibly applied. By design it satisfies a variety of needs and situations. Not only are contradictions avoided within a given compartment, but there are also prepared excuses for the contradictions between compartments.

It's such a tidy scheme that it's tempting to assume that this form of compartmentalization is more common than it is. Career philosophers, theologians, scholars, and debaters probably excel at it. Yet I highly doubt that everybody else is always putting that much effort into achieving thoughtful organization, self-coherency, and valid albeit convoluted reasoning. It seems to me that many—including some who offer peculiar responses to surveys—don't necessarily bother having consistent "compartments" at all. The territories of their competing claims are more fluid.

Theirs are more like the areas (volumes? regions?) of water in a lake. The areas are hardly separate but are touching, pushing, exchanging contents, shrinking, growing. People in this frame of mind may confess that their ideas about what's accurate or not aren't anchored to anything solid. Their felt opinion is endlessly shifting back and forth like the tide. Their speculations bob around on the unpredictable currents of their obscure intuitions.

Even so, the areas can be told apart. The areas aren't on the same side of the lake or aren't the same distance from the shore. The analogy is that, if prodded, the believer may roughly identify the major contrasting areas they think about. The moment that their accounts start to waver is when the areas' edges and relative sizes are probed. Tough examples help to expose this tendency. Would they examine pivotal claim Q by the rules of A or B? Perhaps they're hesitant to absolutely choose either option because they sense that committing would imply a cascade of judgments toward topics connected to Q.

In effect, the boundaries they use aren't like compartment walls but like water-proof ropes that run through a spaced series of little floats. These ropes are positioned on the surface of the lake to mark important areas. Unlike the tight lanes in an indoor swim race, if they're tied too loosely they move around a bit. Similarly, although believers may be willing to lay out some wobbly dividing lines on top of their turbulent thoughts, their shallow classifications could be neither weighty nor stable. They may refuse to go into the details of how they reach decisions about borderline cases. They can't offer convincing rationales for their differing reactions to specific claims.

This fuzzy-headed depiction raises a natural question. They certainly can't have consciously constructed all this for themselves. So how did it develop? What leads to "informal compartmentalization" without genuine compartments? The likely answer is that ideas from various sources streamed in independently. Close ideas pooled together into lasting areas, which eventually became large enough to be a destination for any new ideas that were stirred in later. The believer was a basin that multiple ways of thinking drained into. As their surroundings inevitably changed, some external flows surged and some dried up. Whether because of changing popularity or something more substantial, in their eyes some of their peers and mentors rose in trustworthiness and some sank. Over time, the fresh and stagnant areas were doomed to crash inside them.

The overall outcome is like several selves. The self that's most strongly activated in response to one idea isn't the self that would be for some other idea. This kind of context-dependent switching is actually a foremost feature of the brain. Its network structure means that it can model a range of varying patterns of nerve firings, then recall the whole pattern that corresponds to a partial signal. It's built to host and exploit chaotic compartmentalization.

A recurring metaphor for this strategy is a voice vote taken in a big legislature. The diverse patterns etched into the brain call out like legislators when they're prompted. The vote that emerges the loudest wins. The result is essentially statistical, not a purely logical consequence of the input. The step of coming up with a sound justification could happen afterward...or never. The ingrained brain patterns are represented by the areas in the lake. Overlapping patterns, i.e. a split vote, are represented by the unsteady area boundaries.

The main lesson is that a many-sided viewpoint can be the product of passive confusion or willful vagueness, not mature subtlety. Unclear waters may be merely muddy, not deep. Arguing too strenuously with someone before they've been guided into a firm grasp on their own compartmentalization is a waste. It'd be like speaking to them in a language they don't know. One can't presume that they've ever tried to reconcile the beliefs they've idly picked up, or they've noticed the extent of the beliefs' conflicts. It might be more fruitful to first persuade them to take a complete, unflinching inventory of what they stand for and why. (Religious authorities would encourage this too. They'd prefer followers who know—and obey—what their religion "really" teaches.)

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