Does the Left Side of Your Brain Know What the Right Side Is Doing?

DOES THE LEFT SIDE OF YOUR BRAIN KNOW WHAT THE RIGHT SIDE IS DOING? The ability of people to communicate with one another or understand one another requires a common basis for cognition. The participants must perceive the same thing; share an understanding of reality—Lincoln’s first principles. Without a common perception of the world, people cannot even recognize what other people are trying to say. Their conversations might as well take place between persons riding on trains going in opposite directions. Education must convey the truths that govern all things. Given our existential existence, reality proves extremely illusive. We can only interpret the limited energy we can process in its various forms and construct images that reflect an organization of that energy into comprehensive algorithms that adapt us to the world in which we live. The distance between light bouncing off a tiger and the perception that one is in danger requires a host of processes that took forever to evolve. Complexity led natural selection to devise a dual system for constructing reality, each providing a different strategy for interpreting energy. Thinking is an artistic process. The brain has two separate spheres, left and right, that function differently yet compliment one another. They provide the biological basis for familiar dichotomies like left/right, liberal/conservative, fact-based first principles/word-based first principles, and deductive/inductive reasoning. For reasons not yet clear, people tend to favor one or the other of the dichotomies. Great artists may utilize both to the fullest effect but few people do. Cognitive dissonance follows and the trains continue to pass in the night. In discussing the shape of various dichotomies I will not refer to the left or right side of the brain. The left side of the brain does not give rise to liberalism and I am not tracking specific behaviors to any part of the brain. I only address the functioning of dichotomies in cognitive dissonance. The dynamic duo (left/right side of the brain) designs a fair piece of human nature. One side takes experience holistically without attempting to reduce it to algorithms. It employs inductive reasoning. The other side applies deductive reasoning to develop the algorithms that make science and art possible. The two sides communicate and when the resulting algorithms reach a certain level of development, they become part of one’s operating system. The results may vary dramatically. My observations conclude that some people perceive reality through the Word and others perceive reality as a collection of Facts. A sacred text, authority, a dictator, or some static meme defines the Word. Without analysis, comparison, distinction, or other test for the meaning of experience, inductive reasoning may explain undifferentiated experience with constructs such as God. Ironically, the Word as a means of defining the holistic experience creates a constraint system that requires one to put square pegs into round holes for the sake of certainty—hence the paradox of conservative thinking. Inductive reasoning permits holistic observation but the adaptations for resolving the multiplicity inherent in holistic experience may create dogmas that require everything to conform to the Word, not the Word to reality. Filtering experience through prior constructs alters the perception of reality. Deducing facts can be just as tricky. They are based on tests of identity, reliability, and the ability to disclose predictions. We can believe that fire requires fuel, heat, and oxygen because of the fact that if we remove one of the three, the fire goes out. Most facts are not that easy to ascertain. The scientific method makes its share of mistakes. Mathematics and other definitions of fact also create constraint systems that filter reality. I define cognitive dissonance as the difference between reality and what we perceive as reality. While this may be overly broad, it serves my purpose: why communication is so difficult. I include in “communication” reading the signs nature gives us. Natural selection does not favor us with a wisdom that distinguishes short-term from long-term adaptations in the short term—the paradox. If the short-term adaptation uses up the resources needed before natural selection eliminates the short-term adaptation, the species does not survive. Those who look for the short-term solution will perceive reality differently than those taking the long view. Because of its tool-making capacity, the human species has a large stake in avoiding short-term fixes. We may adapt to our tools instead of the biological world that sustains us to a point where our genes can no longer adapt to the new environment our tools create. Given a lack of wisdom and natural disasters, surviving natural selection is something of a miracle, like winning the lottery. Natural selection takes no prisoners. Fact-based reality, as in science, may afford means of correcting error. Some of the information required to discover deductive error may come from inductive reasoning, just as misreading holistic experience may surface through deductive reasoning’s handling of detail. The two approaches to ascertaining reality require integration to achieve an equilibrium that permits specific responses to the present challenges of survival while avoiding those adaptations that prejudice continuation of the species. Technology may increase food production at the expense of healthy soil, which in time will decrease food production. Without holistic oversight, side effects of technology—the unintended consequences—may reduce chances of survival. The competition between individuals to survive drove biological evolution. However, individuals cannot compete with communities that employ divisions of labor based on merit where everyone participates in the production and distribution of the things produced. Hence, natural selection gave us tribes. The ability to cooperate is part of our genetic makeup. Paradoxically, the power of the tribe to protect individuals resulted in wars between tribes. Speculatively, the destructive power of tribes may well have prompted natural selection to favor the invention of God as a way of reducing tribal conflicts through a common ‘father.’ Natural selection also influences group survival. In the acquisition of resources, the composition and functioning of one group may marshal resources better than other groups. Individuals must decide how much of their personal search for wealth they are willing to sacrifice to maximize the group’s efficiency—the social contract. How much will they benefit from the group’s ability to provide? As if relationships are not already complicated enough, the relationship between the group and the individual adds another layer of adaptations natural selection may influence. A different perception of how individuals and/or groups should relate to one another also colors reality. Hundreds of years of wars between tribes and then nations and the sacrifices people were forced to make to support them for the benefit of king or church focused the last few centuries on the relationship between group and individual. The American Constitution and subsequent guarantees of individual rights were supposed to resolve that relationship, first in America and then the world. Such was our hubris. Individualism has now reached a point where the functioning of necessary cooperative efforts is at risk. Cognitive dissonance has reached a point where America is becoming ungovernable as partisan politics turns the dichotomies into something like an inquisition to eliminate the evil other. Instead of dealing with our factual problems, a holy war for dominance of one philosophy over the other ensues. Who pays taxes becomes a question of who deserves to keep their profits, the keepers of the faith, rather than what government needs to do for everyone. A battle of Words provides a distraction from on-the-ground needs and the waste and fraud that is robbing the government of needed revenue—an apology for greed. The mediation of the three contests, individual versus individual, group versus group, and individual versus group takes the form of government, culture, and moral codes. Once biological competition has evolved a competent species, unbridled competition between individuals weakens everyone. The earliest codes address that problem. When tribes were small and isolated, little need for codes between tribes existed. Raiding one another provided another resource. The consequences of technology have drastically altered relationships between groups. In the atomic age, cognitive dissonance between modern tribes threatens life. In spite of the fact that people everywhere possess the same wiring, significant differences in perception can generate opposite conclusions. Conflicting adaptions follow. I will take for example the perception of wealth—another context for developing cognitive dissonance. Before the invention of money, wealth was something real—a resource. It took the invention of ‘property’ to limit access to wealth by anyone with the ability to use it. Money became the universal means of trading labor or property. In the games of monopoly that followed, fewer and fewer people owned resources. Money became all-important, a new religion. God is what we believe we must obey to survive and nearly everyone survives on money. The belief that money is wealth leads to strategies that destroy resources, real wealth. Capitalism is the business of turning real wealth into paper wealth. The more petroleum Shell pumps, the more money it makes. Price only reflects market fluctuations. No incentives for conservation exist under present means of accounting. A great many other unfortunate adaptations follow from the deification of money. Both deductive and inductive reasoning can make a shambles out of logic where no first principles are applied. If money is God’s currency, those who possess it are God’s children. It is the measure of who is holy and who is profane and the value of all things. The application of natural selection is perverted by the conclusion that those without money failed to pass the fitness test. Natural selection has nothing to do with possessions outside of resources. Money has no intrinsic value and inter-tribal competition for it does not determine fitness to survive in the natural environment. Nor does it provide a measure for merit in the division of labor that gives groups an advantage. The ability to wrest money from the earth and other people has no correlation to survival skills outside of the money game. It teaches no lessons that one can apply to survival in the world we depend upon for support. Those who deify money consider government programs that support those not able to generate enough money as meddling in God’s scheme, encouraging the lazy, and punishing, through taxes, the righteous. A Darwinian struggle for money determines who are the fittest. The diversity natural selection favors and the strength of the whole that health care and education provide are not as important as maintaining the privileges of big money. Making it big as the only reason for living—the prime motivator that justifies the war of all-against-all—defines the America pathology. That morality will never measure up to what natural selection requires for survival. The reformation of such dissonant views will require the dissemination of scientific research at the street level. For example, the religious prohibition of sex for any other purpose than procreation was based on the assumption that sex served no other purpose. Viewed from the vantage point of natural selection, that is not so. Women need help in raising children and sex helps to keep a man at home. With the additional prohibition against contraceptives, the choice is too many children or too little sex. Both have created considerable dissonance. In another context, economic market theory is justified in part by the assumption that people make their purchases on rationally based self-interest. Research has long since discovered that people buy for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with efficient consumption. The market makes a great many mistakes in the allocation of resources and in inequitable distribution. A good deal of regulation is required to stop fraud and waste. The search for the foundation of morality has created yet other dichotomies. Are human beings basically cooperative and therefore the best government is one that protects people from the environments that degrade and warp and breed ignorance? Are humans basically selfish so that good government requires the restraints of exacting codes and stringent authority? Do people respond to help or must they be left on their own to sink or swim? Are we genetically wired or are we blank slates crafted by education? Depending on how they are applied, these opposing views are not mutually exclusive. Since the introduction of biological, social, and cognitive research based on natural selection, the answers to these questions have become yes and no. Survival is paramount but cooperation provides the strongest way of doing it. The genes define our limits and the physical and social environment determines which genes will apply or get changed. Belief systems govern behavior, often in the face of reality. Good and evil remain powerful metaphors engulfed in cognitive dissonance because, absent first principles, the definitions of good and evil become the handmaidens of agendas. Moral codes (including legislation) may support an agenda that has little or nothing to do with the welfare of the species. In a world growing smaller and smaller in the context of population growth and technology, only survival of the species as a first principle provides a basis for joining the tribes—an all-inclusive morality. That can only be accomplished on the basis of fact. Neither God nor nature has any favorites. Like all animals, we have to take nature as it is. Its adaptations to our technology create things like global warming. The dual approach to cognition may enlighten or confuse. The overlapping social relationships between individuals and groups create conflicts of interest. Technology may serve practical ends while ignoring negative impacts on people and resources. The most dramatic agenda in human affairs evolved from what I reference in my book as the outlaw gene.(1) Metaphorically, the selfish gene strives for survival. The cooperative gene seeks the most efficient way of doing it. The outlaw gene perverts cooperation to justify an elite’s exploitation of other people’s labor. Creating sanctions for an elite to exercise brute force as in slavery can do it or it can be done by socially sanctioned deception as in class stigmatization. Modern history evolved out of the struggle to end forms of divine rights. America started with slavery as a legal property right. We are still fighting the Civil War. Formal slavery ended but the impetus to gain the right to exploit others continues in various guises. White supremacy has merely taken a new face. Money has replaced kings. Inadequate wages, price gouging, and inequality support what I reference as relative slavery sanctioned by ‘markets.’ What are the first principles that will help us perceive the world more clearly and improve the chances of consensus? To begin with, we must take natural selection as the context of all human understanding. It is our history, the necessary context for research, and the basis for determining what may succeed. In that context, survival of the species provides the basis for judging the ethical use a given technology or social norm. Judgments based on on-the-ground results, not dogma or philosophy, improve the ability to integrate inductive and deductive reasoning. Applying the same standard to everyone will also improve the chances of consensus. Finally, the genius of the American Constitution should be recognized in a larger context. The strategy of dividing power between three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) and other divisions of power prevented the rise of totalitarian agendas. The outlaw gene had to contend with a viable mechanism for looking after the common good. The strategy should be expanded to end all too prevalent conflicts of interest in government and to prevent anyone from achieving economic power that gives them the ability to buy government and design the economy for their own purposes. People fear government power and ignore the ability of big money to buy government. Taxes, rules against conflicts of interest in government, and universal health care and education must create a more equitable balance of power everywhere. The great divide for some time, and growing, concerns the nature of government. Should it be big or small? What should it do? At the moment, that discussion takes place in the context of government debt but the real issues turn on who pays taxes and who benefits from those taxes. The small government tribe (the money tribe) wants to spread the taxes but not the benefits. They want the enforcement of property rights and contracts, some public safety, a big military to keep the oil and other resources coming and no labor unions, social security or safety nets—government for the wealthy. Many who are not wealthy buy into the money tribe’s philosophy on the mistaken assumption that a country this large in a world changing too fast can survive without regulation or safety nets. The money tribe really wants no interference with any moneymaking scheme, be it speculative or ecologically unsound or that brings down wages. If the money tribe has its way, money will gain complete control and democracy will become a sham. We have almost reached that point now. The money tribe appears ready to even sacrifice the economy, government budgets, and all the other tribes to bring down government. Without decent wages, social security, and other programs, the economy will fail. Debts will not get paid. The money tribe has yet to recognize the wisdom that one should be careful of getting what they want. Cognitive dissonance may create mirages of a promised land where only a desert awaits us. Hard times for some easily become hard times for all. Making our neighbors pay for capitalism’s failures is one way that happens. (1) Natural Selection's Paradox: the Outlaw Gene, the Religion of MOney, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud.