Book Review: The Biological Mind by Dr. Justin Garson (In Progress)

Note: This is a work in progress, and this post is a rough draft for anyone interested in the field of cognitive science, psychology or evolutionary psychiatry. I'll update this blog with my complete review as soon as I'm finished with it.

This is just a collection of my comments, thoughts and opinions, and I’d like to know if you have any comments you wish to share or feedback or constructive criticism related to my ideas or writing. It’s a long one, and you have been warned. I’d also like to connect if you have similar interests, or were able to get through all of it without skipping any parts with your sanity and cognitive faculties intact, bonus points if you’re also alive, human and enjoyed it. There are paragraphs from the book, and with it my comments.

I know you know this, but just in case, and because I feel obliged to let you know, don’t force yourself to read it all, because let’s be realistic- you can’t really expect to match my levels of insanity without going insane yourself, and even though I don’t consider insanity a bad thing, at least the healthy type that causes no dysfunction or distress, my opinion on this matter is obviously a very biased one, so you do what’s best for you. Without further ado, here’s my review of Dr. Justin Garson’s book ‘The Biological Mind’.

Before starting with the book, a little about how I came across it. An email message I sent to Dr. Garson is pretty self-explanatory, so I shall just paste the main content here as it is:

"I am a first-year undergraduate student and I recently came across your essay on Aeon titled 'The helpful delusion', which I found a very interesting perspective on the function our emotions serve. The timing also happened to coincide with one of my introductory psychology classes where I learned about 'learned helplessness' and how it's a signal from your brain to stop doing something that you keep on doing despite repeated failures.

Both the essay and the concept of learned helplessness gave rise to some questions that I thought you'd be able to resolve for me or at least guide me towards the right path. The first question is- Could it be possible that negative emotions like anxiety and jealousy don't actually indicate that there exists some problem in our daily lives, but that they are the problems themselves; put another way, could it be that it's just because of these emotions that we are compelled to change our way of doing things, and we that we would've done just fine without them?

I understand that some of our instinctive visceral reactions and intuitions evolved to help us survive in an environment where the cost of not listening to your emotions was quite high, but in the modern world, I notice that the intensity of such negative emotions is too high and so they cause too much suffering which makes me doubt whether the benefits of these emotions really outweigh all the suffering that they cause. Would a person who doesn't go through such emotions over a long period of time really be at a risk proportionate to the suffering they need to deal with, when it's not even clear what the emotions are saying and whether they are really beneficial or just dysfunctional?

What's the line separating dysfunction and a healthy amount of emotions? When do we know that an emotion is pushing us towards changing our life situation, or just an unnecessary malfunctioning of our biology that needs to be cured? For instance, in learned helplessness, when do we know we should really stop trying to achieve our goals, or we should push ourselves despite repeated failures because circumstances change and oftentimes emotions lead to irrational decisions?

One last point I'd like to mention involves psychopaths and their ability to not feel any emotion. I usually wonder if overall their satisfaction with life is higher, because even though their lack of inhibitions leads to excessive risk-taking behaviour, they don't go through prolonged periods of suffering, and the only cost is an increased risk of death. Some would argue that death is better than suffering, and I also think we could learn something about the mechanisms of emotions from them.

I'm still a beginner to this subject, but I am curious about knowing the answers to these questions. I apologize in advance if my questions reflect a poor grasp of the topic or that I seem to have misunderstood any concept you attempted to explain. In that case, I'd be willing to learn and greatly appreciate it if you could help me clear my doubts. Thank you for taking the time to read my mail. Looking forward to your reply."

Dr. Garson replied by telling me that this is an ongoing debate in psychiatry, and we currently have no solutions to these problems, but he shared with me some interesting resources which did not include this textbook, but as the textbook he recommended is going to be released later this year, I felt like going through this book in the meanwhile, and I'm glad I did. Starting with the review now.

“In short, Malthus’ gloomy proposal was this: in human society, there will always be want. There will always be need. There will always be poverty, and starvation, and competition. That is because human beings are driven by two incompatible desires: the desire for food and the desire for sex. People like to eat and they like to have sex. But when they have sex, they drive population growth—and eventually run out of food. A bit of mathematical reasoning convinced Malthus that the problem was insoluble. Hence the necessity of poverty, starvation, early death. Malthus railed tirelessly against the social welfare programs of his day, programs that, in his opinion, only encouraged the poor to have more children and thereby perpetuate their miserable state.

The principle of natural selection isn’t just the application of the struggle for existence to the rest of life. After all, the idea of natural selection never occurred to Malthus. Darwin and Wallace’s pivotal realization was that starvation, malnutrition, and early death do not befall all members of a population equally. These woes are unevenly doled out. Scrub jays with sharp memory will likely survive the winter better than those with poor memory, since they can better remember where they hid their food. Deer mice with lighter fur can hide more easily in the Nebraska Sandhills than their darker siblings, and thereby better escape predation by hawks. In general, if any creature possesses a distinctive trait, or phenotype, that gives it an edge in the struggle for existence, and if this trait can be faithfully passed on from parent to offspring, then the trait should spread through the population.”

As Malthus and Darwin say above, competition is inherent to nature. Species like to eat and reproduce, and they keep doing that till the population is too much and food too little to sustain everyone. This calls for some radical ways to limit population growth and to restrict and keep at same levels to population in the future, some way to ensure that the population never exceeds the resources we have, and everyone on Earth can live a dignified and satisfactory life with an acceptable level of living-standards so no one has to compete too much or suffer at the cost of another. Poor shouldn’t have kids if the kids would also be likely to suffer.

There could be a parenting test, or at least some way to ensure with a reliable method of predicting whether the offspring would suffer and then determine whether or not the pleasures of life would outweigh the possible suffering, some sort of threshold criteria set in advance, and only then bring them into existence, after ensuring we have enough resources to not only sustain them, but to allow them to thrive and self-actualize, provide them with the best possible environment to flourish and never go through excessive and unnecessary suffering. Reminder: Not endorsing these ideas, don't believe in them, just playing with their implications to see where it takes me.

Another point is, what consequences would my idea of controlling and manipulating life factors like intelligence and creativity discussed in first paragraph have on the species? Malthus said it’s a part of nature, but if we do what I have suggested, there would be less competition, and hence less variation that would allow unfair chance advantage of some members of a species to survive over others. It’s all well when it’s just survival, but there is also unnecessary suffering involved, and I think that it’s worth it to bring about some uniformity at the cost of diversity if we could reduce unnecessary suffering (unnecessary is key here, because we need to determine optimal levels of suffering required for human flourishing.)

So even though my idea could end the whole process of natural selection itself, it’s still such a disputed theory we don’t know the specifics of, and it’s a whole another question of whether it is ethical and required and if the suffering it results in is acceptable for all the advantages it confers on some members of a species. Couldn’t we at least try to answer these questions, and find a way to get those advantages without all the suffering it causes to both sentient human and non-human animals?

But if there is no competition and same resources, won’t it violate some fundamental law of nature? And how would then individuals compete for scarce resources? Well, we could create a society where the population must under no condition exceed the resources, and that would eliminate any need for competition. We could use our faculties of thinking and reasoning to overcome this brutal law that we had taken for granted without even trying to change or investigate how much we could control, just like the external factors that influence us I discussed earlier, and fall into the trap of learned helplessness.

We focus on causes like education and spreading awareness about contraceptives, and I don’t deny that those things are important to control population and bring it down to acceptable levels, but we could also look at the big picture and see where the species is going, and try to be more proactive to prevent as much suffering as possible as early as possible.

Also, some people dispute that overpopulation is even a problem, and say that the world would level out itself soon by itself. I admit that I haven’t looked into the issue, the hard data and empirical evidence or scientific papers, myself yet, but I still have a refutation for that- okay, the world levels out, but what if it rises drastically again? What guarantee do you have that it would stay like this for centuries after it levels out? What about the competition and suffering that would take place then? Couldn’t we come up with an ideal system that could speed up the process to have an acceptable level of population that would prevent a lot of present suffering as well as future suffering? This is also something in line with Longtermism and the goals of Effective Altruism, and we must keep the long term goals in mind while making such decisions, because every small decision could have a butterfly effect on the future events through a chain of cause and effect that we currently can’t see.

Animals don’t just compete with one another for survival. After all, even if you survive well, but you’re terrible at finding mates, then you won’t leave any progeny to carry your design features into the future. Cynical as it sounds, the number and quality of potential sexual partners is itself a limited resource, much like food or shelter. The members of one sex must compete with each other for mating opportunities with the other sex. There is no way around this unpleasant fact. “Sexual selection” describes this competition. Sexual selection isn’t something different from natural selection. Rather, it’s one form that natural selection can take.

Male birds are famous for their displays of physical strength, elaborate song, nest building, or colourful plumage, by which they woo the hearts of the females, and sometimes other males. (This is called “female choice” because it’s usually the male of the species that strives to make itself attractive to the female, thereby encouraging her to choose him as a partner.) We want to be the most handsome or beautiful, the funniest, the sharpest, the richest, the most generous one in the room. Look at me! Look at what I made! Admire my physical beauty! Consider my many accomplishments! I’m the one that you want!

So you say that virtue signalling could also be a form of signalling your superiority over other males to attract females. Coming to the human world and my personal experiences for a moment, I myself consider all the focus on appearance and romantic nonsense to be a huge waste of time, no offense to anyone who finds joy in it, my point is that I don’t, and I feel like spending my time on activities and pursuits I consider much more productive, one of the being cultivating the values and qualities I prioritize and wish to manifest and live according to.

Now you made me think if these values are genuinely something I want for myself, or if I’m unconsciously motivated to embody these values because I think that my ideal partner would find these qualities attractive, and a person who finds these qualities and values attractive would be a good fit for me, someone I find attractive and would like to be my partner. That would be really bad and deceptive of my brain and selfish genes, a bit too selfish, because I consciously have no desire to mate and reproduce.

Also because these values are things that I (and I am willing to hazard a guess many, but certainly not the majority) of the population strives for, because these values are what are said to be our own, free of all societal influence and ulterior motives, but we would never know for certain until we deeply investigate all the factors that influence these values and qualities we aim to see in ourselves, and how we can actually strive for something that is aligned with our own personal inclinations and desires rather than what society tells us or what our unconscious primal urges passed down over generations tell us.

Are you insinuating that human beings are subject to the same mindless laws of nature as birds? Are you now going to tell me that all those social media posts in which my attributes are on display—my humour, my altruism, my attractiveness, my accomplishments—represent some unconscious bid to outcompete my friends for sexual partners?” To the first question, about whether people follow the same mindless laws as birds, the answer is an unequivocal yes. The same laws that apply to animals apply to people, since people are animals.

That’s been common knowledge since the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus made the courageous decision to add Homo sapiens to his classification of animals, back in 1758, almost exactly 100 years before the publication of On the Origin of Species. The answer to the second question, about whether your social media usage is a form of sexual signalling, is a definite maybe: it can be quite hard to say, in any specific case, whether and how a bit of human behaviour is the programmed expression of an ancient reproductive strategy. Hard, but not impossible.

I have seen people falling for such things many times now. They seem to have this anthropocentric view that humans are something superior to all other life forms because we have a mind or something, and for the same reason think that more intelligent life forms than ours isn’t possible, so they’re in for a huge shock once we develop ASI. They also think we have free will and so we aren’t subject to the same laws of nature that these lower life forms are, the input-output simple mindless response to simple stimuli, but they fail to see that we too are animals governed by the constraints of physics and biology, and even though our behaviour and mental processes are much more complex than the lower life forms, we follow the same general rules and principles to the same extent and there is no good reason to think we don’t; I’d be really surprised if at some later stage we discovered that we don’t. And so, with enough information and sophisticated techniques that we currently lack, we could predict a person’s thoughts, desires, motivations and future behaviour with reasonable accuracy.

At the end, our brain is just like an organ like the rest of the organs, a point Dr. Garson also makes at the starting of the book, and so I think that in the near future, looking at the current pace of development of AI and advances in personalized healthcare, precision medicine, computational psychiatry, synthetic biology, BCIs, neurotechnology and similar fields, it’s reasonable to make a guess that we could treat not just mental disorders but even all diseases related to psychological well-being and enable people to self-actualize according to their abilities, interests, aspirations, values and beliefs, uncover all their subconscious and unconscious motivations.

We’ve finally touched on an unavoidable controversy, one that’s been part of evolutionary theorizing since its inception. There’s a widely shared sentiment—I won’t yet call it a theory, but something like a feeling—that Darwin’s theory is brilliant when we’re talking about stag beetles, scrub jays, and stealthy foxes. But its explanatory power grinds to an abrupt halt as soon as you get to people. You can regale me with stories about mating practices among bowerbirds, but as soon as you get to my social media posts, you’ve taken things one step too far. According to this line of reasoning, human behaviors, human actions, human goals, come mainly from culture, not nature. When we cross the threshold of the human mind, Darwinism ends and culture begins. It might be tempting to dismiss this line of reasoning as a vestige of the old-fashioned hubris that wishes to separate our kind from the animals, but there are

Test it maybe, because as we all know we need to rigorously test all our intuitions and scrutinize them by trying to collect empirical evidence and use our faculties of logic and reasoning with the scientific method to experimentally verify or disprove our theories (being able to falsify is important) using methods that predict some phenomena and set what conditions would prove and what would disprove our theories and then modify our theories accordingly. I admit I haven’t looked too deeply into the philosophy of science yet so I apologize if I misunderstood the process or omitted something important.

But my point is, why can’t we test it? Oh, Ethics. Yes, Ethics is important, but I have always wondered, in science you are not allowed to perform experiments considered going against the societal norms and the prevalent moral views at any given time in any given culture, until some evil mad scientist or dictator rises and does it themselves. Now, why do we need to go so far? We already know how such experiments have greatly expanded our frontiers of knowledge and understanding of stuff we were too afraid to try before some sociopath took it in their own hands.

Try to receive this idea with an open mind, it may sound unconventional: I feel (feel, not think, that means I haven’t rigorously tested my intuitions yet and am open to change my mind in light of convincing reasonable logical arguments or evidence to the contrary) that the harm we are doing with such restrictive ethics is more evil than the harm the occasional dictator dashes out on certain populations.

Why do I think so? Because we forget that if we take some bold steps and allow a willing researchers and a willing volunteer to participate in experiments designed to test stuff we deem unethical at the time, and allow the experiments to continue without any backlash from morally and emotionally motivated members of the general public who oppose it, by convincing them how it is logically and scientifically the most rational course of action, we could come up with discoveries and innovative cures that could prevent a lot of future suffering.

If we continue with our current state of knowledge, we would stay ignorant forever unless another sociopathic dictator rises in the future and does it themself, but if we don’t understand these things that require us to extend the acceptable and ethical moral grey area, we would never be able to understand it and even worse prevent suffering that would take place as a result of our ignorance. If we conduct some experiments at once, which would have very less amount of individuals suffer (in the grand scheme of things, taking a long-term view) that too if they’re willing to volunteer and compensated for their contribution to Science, then we could prevent a large amount of individuals in the future who could be cured by our new discoveries. Food for thought.

This may also be some sort of general principle that we get to see in theories like how initial suffering pushes some people to give it some sort of meaning by pushing themselves to work for something that is greater than them, as in Frankl’s Logotherapy, and how from my own personal experiences I find that some unfortunate circumstances teach me valuable lessons that prevent many potential future failures and mishaps that would have occurred had I not learned the lesson from my initial mistakes.

This is also how I came up with the rule to extract general principles from my failures and not just turn it into a learning opportunity but leverage it to achieve my future goals, because everything has pros and cons, and what you consider your misfortune may have some hidden upsides or a silver lining you have failed to detect but might discover if you try to. Both these things obey the same sort of vague principle- some initial undesirable or unfortunate event resulted in net positive outcome for the agent going forward in the future, and had the initial unfortunate or undesirable event not taken place, the agent would have suffered much greater loss by not learning the lessons that the event had to teach.

This might hold true in the case of unethical scientific experiments too, and we’d never know until we try it, and in my opinion the potential risks are much greater than the potential benefits, and the worst case scenario definitely seems to be more undesirable than the best case scenario, so the pros of conducting such experiments overall seem to weight more than the cons, even when compare to the alternatives, and the opportunity cost of not doing so seems to high to be neglected.

I also sometimes think what in our current society is something that the future generations would consider unethical or immoral, and nowadays as I’m realizing the importance of Rationality, I’m thinking what the future generations with much more sophisticated scientific knowledge and tools would consider irrational, and I think what I just discussed could be one of those things.

Wallace fell under the sway of the “Darwin-doesn’t-apply-to-the-mind” ideology. By the 1860s, Wallace had formed the conviction that, while natural selection designed our bodies, it didn’t design our minds. Take our ability to do advanced math. Natural selection can’t explain the mathematical prowess of a Newton, since mathematical prodigies don’t fare any better in the struggle for existence than those of us who are math-impaired. Our intellectual, artistic, and moral faculties outstrip anything the struggle for existence would have demanded. Rather, these remarkable capacities must be a manifestation of what he called “the unseen universe of Spirit.”6 Wallace, unlike Darwin, never strove to make natural selection an allpurpose principle of mind and body, spirit and nature.

It’s important to realize that fitness isn’t measured simply by the number of offspring one has. Often enough, it’s measured by one’s number of viable offspring; that is, the number of offspring that survive until adulthood. There are at least two different strategies, then, that creatures use for boosting their fitness. One is to have as many offspring as possible and invest in each lightly. Another is to have fewer offspring and invest in each heavily. Elephants have followed the second route, with a gestation period that lasts almost two years and very intense, sometimes lifelong, mother–calf bonds. Oak trees follow the first route. In a good year an oak can drop up to 10,000 acorns; with luck, one will survive to maturity.

Ideology again, but I won’t talk about that because I’ll cover that in another post. Talking about the second paragraph, that sounds eerily similar to two other analogical specific instances from real-world situations, one from the world of venture capitalists and the other from one of my earlier project ideas. The one with the VCs is that many VC firms instead of funding a very small number of startups that they think would go on to be successful, adopt the alternative approach of funding a large number of startups, an when a very tiny fraction of those startups go on to become unicorns, the profits they make far exceed the initial amount of investments they made including all the startups that later failed.

The second situation was a project plan that I won’t describe in detail, but in very brief it was the idea applied to a free medical coaching system that enabled underprivileged and underrepresented children to become medical doctors, and had them pay back a certain fraction of their yearly income as fees for the help they received years back; here too it’s a very small number of people who make it and become doctors, and they make up for all the investment that went into all of them including the ones who didn’t. I didn’t execute this plan due to some problems I faced when I started working out the finer details, and later modified it to change the target group and approach, but never leave the problem; it’s still a problem, and I just need to find a better solution.

Anyway, I also later learned that another university follows the same model for programming and tech sector, by teaching kids programming for free and having them pay only if and when they land a job. I just described two analogies from the real world, and analogies are a powerful way to uncover connections between fields and make novel discoveries or build innovative products that have a significant positive social impact. Analogies aren’t just a way to explain a concept in several different ways, they are an application of abstract general principles to problems in various disciplines, and the principles themselves are developed from specific instances, so it’s important to learn how to extract such general principles and rules from every specific instance- every new concept you learn or events from your personal experiences.

That’s also why mathematics has all these general rules but you build an intuitive understanding and gain mastery or achieve expertise for a topic by repeatedly applying a general principle to specific problems; not just identifying which general principle is applied to which specific problem, but also correctly applying it where it should be, trying different principles with different problems, just playing around and tackling a problem from multiple principles and solving techniques. If we could do that with philosophy and life, I can’t even begin to imagine the way it could impact lives and change our ways of thinking and living. It would be a dream come true for Rationality and help us create a better society, but this is just a vague idea, a rough plan, and I need to hold on to this idea and develop it further.

This principle that I just discussed might be represented in some sort of formal mathematical logical language, and be applied to other situations where we currently can’t see the same structure because it’s hidden but nonetheless present, and maybe we could use AI to find such analogies (I tried this at a very small scale for a simple concept from physics with ChatGPT, and once again it blew away my mind with what it is capable of, can’t wait for GPT4.)

I won’t even attempt to find such a logical representation of that rule I just intuitively identified in different situations (note to self: also need to investigate the intuitive ability to form such connections between fields in situations that follow the same abstract general principle, without explicitly consciously knowing the logical rule or applying it to different situations to see whether it fits; it’s an important part of intelligence and creativity.)

I just went off on a tangent and digressed too far from the starting point, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing unless you’re annoying someone, and I’m not, as I’m writing my ideas down for myself and for people who are interested in this, not for those who would be annoyed (pretty much everyone I know in real life, no, strike that, it’s everyone) So I also see it as sharing my ideas and thoughts with someone (Or rather, something) that listens without getting annoyed- my notepad or diary. They also can not give me any intelligent feedback or comments, but at least they’re not easily annoyed or refuse to listen; much better antidote for my loneliness than I’d have expected, and who knows, I might even find some like minded humans, which was one of the reasons I started this blog and writing in the first place. Anyway.

The glory of physics is that it, alone, is the realm of ironclad law: the law of refraction, the law of gravitation, the ideal gas law. Biology doesn’t have laws; it has regularities. It is the realm of “usually so, but sometimes not.” The principle of natural selection is no different.

Could we realistically even hope to achieve such high standards with biology, perhaps by using tools and techniques borrowed from mathematics and physics? This is something that makes biology so fun and creative, (not that physics and mathematics isn’t fun, just a different kind of fun.) and social sciences like sociology and psychology even more so, and it’s probably not possible to be absolutely certain of anything, but if we could achieve a level of certainty that physicists enjoy, it could have far-reaching implications for our understanding of human nature, help us improve the human condition and create a better society, one that is closer to the idealistic utopia and more desirable for every person that’s a part of it.

I now realize how it’s also kind of similar to how belief formation works- we never fall prey to dogmatic ideology because open-mindedness is one of the main pillars of the scientific method, and if you’re absolutely certain about something, you won’t be able to change your mind in light of new convincing and reliable empirical evidence. Similarly in biology we come up with a rule that seems to fit in every situation except very few, which we put aside as anomalies and accordingly modify our theory to also accommodate these anomalies, and hence we get closer to truth, until we detect more anomalies and then modify our theory even more.

We can never be certain, and we strive for consistency, but in reality, we can neither be absolutely certain (we can only gather evidence, never prove anything as is the case with pure mathematics) neither can we be perfectly consistent, because if we don’t allow ourselves to be a little inconsistent, we would never be able to change ourselves and our plans, and we would fall prey to narrow minded dogma.

Basically, wherever there is competition, just the ten percent outperforms the rest and reaps all the rewards. Competition in any and every scenario and discipline, one of the general principles that miraculously holds true in many cases. We can see this in the income gap and capitalism, software bugs, sales, frequency of words used in a language, and healthcare among many other fields. You could read more about it on the net. I wonder if there are certain genetic traits that account for some specific skills and behaviour that makes some members more capable of surviving and thriving in any given environment than the rest, and if we could pin down those ten percent of traits and their genetic basis to determine what is the most suitable genotype to thrive in any given environment. Need to explore this idea further.

The reason that humans show such uniform species design—with nearly identical hearts, livers, and lungs—isn’t because natural selection is finished with us. It’s because creatures with poorly designed hearts are swiftly eliminated from the population.

This reminds me of the cognitive bias called the Availability Heuristic and the Selection Bias, where you neglect all the failures and just look at the ones who succeeded to form a skewed judgment of how likely you are to attain success in a field. That’s one application of the instance, but it’s a general observation following a logical structure that could be used to analyze many events in daily life, events that people time and time again fall for, either because they’re ignorant of the bias, or because they know about it but are unable to apply the general rule to the instance, (that’s why just knowing the bias isn’t enough to avoid it, but still important if you wish to have any realistic chance of avoiding it in the future; it’s necessary but not sufficient.) more usually the former.

There are some interesting instances of selection bias that have occurred throughout history- one very interesting case involving some military jets during world war- and instances from daily life we fall for without even being aware of it, but I won’t get into that and would encourage you to look it up on the net.

Technically, Mills and Beatty prefer to talk about propensities rather than dispositions (hence the “propensity account of fitness”). A propensity is a probabilistic (or “chancy”) disposition.

Probabilistic thinking, another one of the very useful thinking tools in my thinking toolbox and allows me to think about the world more clearly. I first encountered it when I read how when you go deep into Probability theory and Quantum Physics, you get to a stage where you have this mind-blowing realization that nothing in reality is absolute, there are no objects, there is only probability, there are just wave functions or electron clouds, and the brain itself is a prediction machine, constantly trying to predict what it could expect to observe before it even happens.

That’s just from neuroscience and physics, but another area where it’s practically useful in daily life is a technique I learned when I studied basic economics and read Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness. It’s one of those things you intuitively seem to know all along and use it while thinking and making decisions, but you can’t pin it down or label it, and then you come across this scientist or philosopher who has already done it and you experience the aha moment- that’s the thing that has eluded me so far, and now I can understand it and apply it consciously.

It’s this- the concept of opportunity costs from Economics and calculated risks from Taleb. In brief, opportunity cost tells you to judge something by comparing it with all the possible alternatives, consider every alternative’s pros and cons, the best and worst case scenarios, keeping in mind the associated probabilities, and finally make a decision by not just considering the resources an alternative would take but also what you’re giving up to get it- that is the freedom to do everything you could’ve done with the time and resources you’re not using to do that thing. That was a not-so-great attempt at explaining the concept of opportunity costs in a general form, but you could look up some examples and better explanation online.

Here goes a similar attempt at explanation for calculated risks- you judge a decision (good or bad) from all the information that was available to you at the time you made it and all other constraints, and if you are able to do that and use the best techniques available to you to arrive at the most optimal and rational decision according to your goals and values, again according to the information you have at that time, then it’s a good decision, and it shall remain so for all points of time in the future, no matter what new information you encounter. So say if your decision later gives you an undesirable outcome because your plan didn’t turn out as intended, it’s still going to remain a good decision.

So, what’s calculated risk? First of all, I’m not sure if Taleb actually calls it that or explains this concept, but I do remember that I got this idea while reading that book, and I don’t know if it already has another name- but here’s the idea- if you make a bad decision (according to your available info, constraints and how you process it) then it’s going to be a bad decision even if an outcome is favourable, and for example he talks about lottery winners and financiers who get lucky and get all the praise from society and boost in self-esteem and overconfidence in abilities even though had they done their mathematics they would’ve realized that the environment is so random that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts would’ve been able to do it once in a while.

So, if you do this, and make a good decision, you’re making a calculated risk, and calculated risks are better than foolish uncalculated risks, because by calculating all the probabilities and pros and cons and opportunity costs, you’re going in eyes wide open aware of all the possible consequences and contingencies, and at least you’re not ignorant or leaving yourself at the mercy of chance and randomness.

This principle could be applied to any decision you make, any activity you do, and to preserve your cognitive resources, time and sanity, I’d advise you to keep it for the more important decisions, unless you’re some sort of lunatic who derives inherent pleasure from overanalyzing and overthinking to logically figure out the rational course of action. Just to not leave out a related topic I can’t move on without mentioning, check out counterfactuals; it’s basically the concept of opportunity cost applied to the past, and helps with creative stuff.

My ability to come up with this plan requires that I get cause-and-effect reasoning, I get counterfactual reasoning (the ability to think through not-yet-real situations) and I get the rules of physics for mid-sized objects like boars. The boar is far heavier than a pile of twigs and leaves and therefore they will break under its weight. I can see all of this in my mind’s eye almost as if it is happening right in front of me.

This reminds me of a very old paper on intuitive physics I read a few years ago- how our brain is so good at intuitively grasping things like gravity and how we know what the trajectory of a thrown ball is going to be, things like that. But when we try to implement this in machines, it turns out to be a seemingly impossible, or at best, a very hard task.

Same with things like vision and simple limb movements we do without even thinking because they are learned and intuitive, so they're automated and we don't require much thought for these actions which is a good thing because we have free mental space and cognitive energy to expend on other, more important, tasks. But we also must remember how fascinating and mysterious all of it is, and appreciate it's beauty and express gratitude for this wonderful gift and experience we happen to be able to enjoy.

The points about counterfactual thinking and cause-and-effect reasoning reminds me of something I talk in another blog post and that's also connected to intuitive physics- how we could understand and manipulate the intuition to be more in line with reality- just as some people are unable to grasp simple physics due to mental deficits due to which they are unable to catch a ball thrown at them or balance their body in space, for instance, whereas on the other side of the spectrum there are people who are able to intuitively grasp much more complex topics in higher physics and mathematics, and if we could know the mechanisms involved, we could emulate them and cure such disorders, perhaps even enhance the average to speed up scientific discovery.

If not that, we could at least study how such people arrive at such intuitive understanding and novel insights, which is by the way also a central part of scientific creativity and innovation, and pin down the thinking processes or frameworks to develop such an intuitive understanding or come up with new insights.

If not even that, the more realistic goal could be figuring out the practices and training, or the type of concepts, that indirectly improve thinking and logical or creativity skills, and more importantly, are transferrable from one task to another so, say, the training in chess translates to real life strategic thinking, or the training in thinking about everyday tasks like computational algorithms translates to better logical skills while solving mathematical problems or writing code.

"It isn’t so strange, given that Darwin and Wallace were products of the same intellectual climate, the same social and political upheavals, the same restless questioning of the ancient creationist creed. In particular, both Darwin and Wallace were profoundly infuenced by the rather pessimistic theories of an English political scientist, Thomas Malthus, and his idea of the struggle for existence. Their thinking was also shaped by other major movements in the life sciences, such as Lyell’s uniformitarianism."

Just like the Unabomber, whom I write about in another post, they were also influenced by a lot of stuff they had studied early and adopted as their personal philosophy and guiding principles of life, or at least that had equipped them with the thinking tools and general concepts that they applied to problems later in their life.

This makes me wonder what other hidden treasures there are in philosophy and history of science, less-known ideas that few have come across that have the potential to shape the thinking of youth, either by directly providing them with a lens to see the world, thinking tools to apply to every problem they encounter and how they approach it, or indirectly by affecting their cognitive abilities, beliefs or worldview.

If the Unabomber had come across other philosophical writing, or had been in an environment that allowed him to do that and exposed him to such ideas, could he have been a mathematician not remember for what he is currently remembered for, but something like winning the Nobel or solving a Millennium Problem? I could pose the same question for Darwin by proposing a more pessimistic and undesirable alternative history, but you get the point I'm trying to make.

It also makes me realize how important ideas usually thought to be outdated could play such a significant role in affecting our outlook even in the modern world, after all the classics and mainstream philosophical writings have survived this long for a reason, so that makes sense, but it also makes me think how these people went ahead with the philosophy they encountered at a very young age- the philosophy they happened to come across their age and time, even if there were several, I doubt they were an exhaustive sample.

What I mean is: if I read five philosophers and adopt the worldview of one because I happen to agree with them, and then make serious life decisions based on that worldview, would i not think if there were other perspectives I may have overlooked, other philosophers I have never read that I might 'like' more?

Now of course it's never possible to acquire all knowledge there is to acquire all at once, read all books and understand everything every philosopher every said, get exposed to all ideas that ever existed, however badly I wish that were true and however frequently my brain gives me dreams of having perfect knowledge of all chains of cause and effect as well as things that are currently not quantifiable and objective.

And I also realize that what I propose only holds any value if learning about other philosophers would help you have a more optimistic or realistic outlook on life or help you make better better decisions in life. Otherwise it's all just a matter of preferences, like the explore-exploit tradeoff I cover in another post, and at one point of time you have to close off all your alternatives and go ahead with the decision you have made based on all the analysis you have already done, and that's why our brains are good at rationalizing our decisions based on our intuitions.

This also connects with my idea of never adopting any ideological belief without scrutinizing it with logic, finding counter-evidence, and even then holding all the ides, beliefs, opinions and thoughts at a safe distance, emotionally detaches so as to not attach your self-identity to them, because you can never be absolutely certain about anything, and there are always going to be counter-arguments and counter-evidence.

There are animals that, if they feel anything at all, do not feel wariness. The sponge, if it feels at all, does not know anxiety. Its job is to anchor itself frmly in the ocean foor and flter particulate matter through its epithelium, a fne mesh of cells like a layer of skin. If predators approach—of which they have few—they can do nothing to protect themselves. Anxiety would be useless. Wariness doesn’t ft the logic of the sponge design.

Very interesting. As I probably have mentioned several times in other posts, I currently believe that trying to eradicate all suffering is a noble cause, because even though there might be levels of suffering optimal to human flourishing, we still don't know when it crosses that line and becomes unnecessary excessive suffering.

Moreover, the worst case scenario (the undesirable subjective mental state or qualia associated with excessive suffering, that should not even exist in the ideal universe) is much worse than the best case scenario (which would be any benefits that optimal suffering provides to a human), the opportunity costs of not trying are too high, the cons outweigh the pros, so to me at least according to my values it seems the most rational thing to try to eradicate all suffering, till we are able to pinpoint the optimal levels, after which it would be easy to induce that much suffering.

And to achieve this, we need to know which living beings are conscious or sentient and are able to experience the intense suffering associated with undesirable mental states; in other words, which beings have a subjective mental state and are not just simple input-output organisms responding to stimuli giving the impression of having agency or at least conscious experience but as we can observe, but can't say for sure, probably don't.

How do we know for sure that sponges don't experience anxiety? Which other animals don't, and at what level does the undesirable subjective experience of anxiety and other negative emotions arise, to the point where it is fully developed as in these bipedal carbon-based life forms called homo-sapiens? Do we even know for sure that all humans experience it, or are some p-zombies, or is everyone a p-zombie and I alone am the sentient being on this planet able to have a subjective mental experience? Okay, never mind, please ignore the last question.

Story time: I once stepped on an ant and even though I consider myself a stoic person and am not easily affected by emotions, I experienced intense guilt and negative emotions when I realized that I killed an ANT, a helpless and possibly sentient being that might have experienced large amounts of unbearable suffering in thee last moments of their life but didn't have any medium to express their anguish and mental agony and convey their predicament, and the loss of all net positive experiences and pleasure they could have had, while it was uncertain if the net positive would outweigh the potential net negative, because if the latter were true then I did them a favour, but regardless I know that I didn't know and now I can never know and my brain is just coming up with clever rationalizations to justify my heinous act (after all I wouldn't let it go so easily had I killed a human or stepped on a human-like tiny being), and so it was very foolish to step on the ant without knowing for some certainty if that were the case, but again it was by mistake, a costly one for the ant, and for me too had I been an unthinking automaton like the majority of my fellow humans with an overly anthropocentric view of the universe and no regard for the mental states of other possible sentient life forms coexisting with us; same for plants by the way.

Just in case you are curious, thought I understand if you are not and I'd be surprised if you are and pray for you (don't know about god, I'm an agnostic atheist, agnostic hanging on due to my belief in open-mindedness and epistemic uncertainty; how about the flying spaghetti monster?) and suggest you to get help if you actually are curious, but I was only consoled when I was told my another human that ants are not sentient, and now I would get back to the point soon but can't close this topic without mentioning that I cried for the first time after several years when I came across a video of chick culling (don't look it up, or maybe do because something needs to be done about it).

And since then I have realized that doing good needs not be affected by the amount of emotional affect you feel for the cause, but rather the urgency and need of the problem, if there is one, and the best methods to solve them, otherwise you're just being selfish.

Coming back to the topic- aren't humans also simple input-output organisms responding to much more complex stimuli but still the same, just with the difference that there are a lot of complex intertwined external factors involved that we currently don't understand and also a feeling of having, or some impression or illusion of, free will, but aren't we essentially the same? Behavioural science would agree, I think, and I don't see any reason we should be different from these primitive life forms other than the differences I mentioned above.

Could it not be possible that the brain like every other physical system is a predetermined and random machine that could be described by the universal laws of physics? I also came across the ideas that consciousness is just a continuous stream of memories we perceive a few microsecond later, based on work done by David Eagleman. But I don't know enough about it yet, and would like to dig deeper.

It's fascinating how such simple organisms are able to demonstrate behaviour so similar to higher-order cognitive processes in humans such as altruism, compassion, empathy, kindness or selfishness, and it makes me think we humans could be like them just with an ability to turn an eye upon ourselves and be able to investigate them as well as ourselves, but regardless of the truth it remains fascinating and beautiful natural phenomena and I'm glad to have the opportunity to reflect on and potentially unveil it's mysteries, which would make it less mysterious yet more beautiful, yet every new information I encounter and knowledge I acquire seems to make it more complex and mysterious, but I'd be lying if I said that I'm not enjoying it, and still looking forward to the day when humans are able to understand it all.

Summary and key takeaways: Evolution is any change over a period of time in any given population. Natural Selection is one of the forces that comes into play during evolution, that selects traits that allows some members of a species to survive and pass on their genetic traits to their offspring. This requires three necessary but not sufficient conditions: variation, fitness differences and inheritance.

There could be evolution with no natural selection, a case in which a population of species undergoes periodic change between red and blue, or there could be natural selection with no evolution, in a case where competing traits cancel each other out and the result is just simple unchanging evolution with no difference in traits of the members of a species over a period of time.

In brief, the individual needs to not just survive, but be different in some way from other members of the population in a way that allows that individual to survive and survive sexual selection, which is just another aspect of natural selection meaning that they need to compete for a partner that could allow them to reproduce unless they can reproduce asexually. Finally, their offspring, who should have the same traits that gave their parent the competitive advantage over the other members, also needs to survive till they can produce their own offspring.

Why do we need to define natural selection rigorously? 1) To know if the general principle holds true for other domains of life too- as in group selection and Dawkin’s memetics, 2) To test the criticism against natural selection that the concept of ‘fitness’ is ill-defined and an empty tautology, and 3) To distinguish natural selection from other evolutionary forces such as Random Genetic Drift.

Natural fitness requires an edge over the other members of the species, and it’s important to understand the concept of natural fitness not just providing an edge to members that are fit, but to members that are fitter relative to the other members. This depends on the environment, because context is important.

To avoid falling prey to the fallacy of circular reasoning, it is also important to understand that the ‘fitter’ member is not one that just survives, but one that has desirable traits (the edge not possessed by the other members) that makes it more likely for them to survive (relative to other members of the species) in their given environment. It helps us to understand the difference between natural selection and random genetic drift. Genetic drift happens when one creature survives better than another, but not because it has an inherent fitness advantage. It just gets lucky.

Keywords and important terms: stabilizing selection or purifying selection, evolution, natural selection, pillars of natural selection: variation, fitness differences, inheritance, memetics.