November 12, 2020

I no longer spend half my week in forensic psychiatry. I have experienced a recent crisis (January) in which I could have died from heart failure. I have rehabilitated from being dizzy, out of breath, and weaker to climbing onto the trails of Oahu with smiles and stamina so at the top of the rise I'm looking around rather than more concerned in catching my breath. I continue to play different piano pieces some very challenging just to master the challenge such as Chopin Prelude. Rebecca and I talk about many different subjects from art, epistemology, family matters, poetry, gardening, practical matters concerning finance, politics, and more. Sometimes we play a game such as checkers. We enjoy cooking, watching our favorite shows together, and our hiking twice per week. I develop my pictures and post them.

 https://www.flickr.com/photos/leonardsjacobs/

I read novels, poems, and books concerning our minds beauty and flaws. I write this blog to understand more what I'm thinking and missing, why people who differ in beliefs from me have these beliefs, how my beliefs are true or false, what I'm thinking and feeling, etc. I often don't know what will come up or how I'll write. 

I'm now part way through Kathryn Schulz book Being Wrong and enjoying it a lot. I've covered some of this ground before but I need more work for it to sink in. The Optimism Bias by Tali Sharot also covers similar ground. 

https://fs.blog/2014/02/kathryn-schulz-being-wrong/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias

She discusses wrongology. Right or wrong implies there is a truth. She destroys our certainty and gives many examples of how being wrong illuminates but our acknowledgment of being wrong is often difficult to bear  because of embarrassment, a false sense of certitude wholly generated within us, our sense of loyalty to our family, group, business, and other beliefs so we resist being illuminated. So our errors in being wrong are either quickly dismissed by us or linger uncomfortable to trouble our equanimity.  Schultz gives the example of Freud's analysis of forgetting a patient's name in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. I had read this many years ago since Ann I purchased for me his complete works and I was attempting to go through many of his books and articles. Freud came upon some entries to a patient he had seen terminating six months ago but he could not remember her name which troubled him. After much reflection he did recall her name and came to the conclusion that his difficulty in memory was due to emotional chagrin due to the fact that he had diagnosed her stomach pains as hysteria when she was found to have cancer in her abdomen and died. Error blindness and amnesia for our mistakes introduces us to her book describing how our human brain perceives, identifies, evaluates, and how our beliefs can distort what we perceive and change facts to suit our beliefs. 

She gives a great example from 1972. A colleague reporter had attended a group discussion of a book The limits of Growth. given by Donella Meadows a coauthor. The book highlighted what we now know as global warming and environmental changes, issues related to dwindling resources, and population growth etc. The author appeared pregnant so the reporter wrote an article mentioning that the author who was pregnant must have some hope for the future since she was going to have a child. To his great chagrin he found out she was not pregnant! Now forty years later he remains very mortified by his wrongfulness. So being wrong can result in our wanting to vomit. We eat crow, eat humble pie, eat our shoe, etc. So one view of being wrong is pessimistic and distasteful. The optimistic view of being wrong may be the opposite. "Surprise, bafflement, fascination, excitement, hilarity, delight," are some of the adjectives she gives for the optimistic view.

When in college at Clark University I did take a few philosophy classes along with history classes. Schultz brings me back to remembering my studies into epistemology. How do we know things. She has some wonderful quotes of the distasteful aspects of being wrong versus the fascinating opportunities for being wrong. Unfortunately if you accept either approach wholeheartedly you'll again be mistaken. Error will always be with us. Truth may be elusive but it's pursuit requires us to be in error to be wrong. Truth is truth for now. The scientist Laplace popularized the bell curve and highlighted that error was essential to find the truth in statistics. 

Our life includes many hours spent in dreaming (REM sleep).  When I was at NIMH doing research in REM sleep in Fred Synder's  M.D. lab I read a lot of studies about dreaming. In dreams we suspend our rational guidelines for reality. We can fly, we become small or big, all sorts of bizarre things can happen and while we're dreaming we accept them and go with the flow. When we report a belief or conclusion that differs markedly from others they wonder what are we smoking! Entheogens are compounds we take to reveal an inner truth. I learned and then used in my practice how our dreams and hallucinations as a gateway into an inner truth now revealed. In our ordinary dreams our day times activities incorporated in memory are replayed sometimes differently with other outcomes and may reveal some inner conflicts we were not aware of. Schulz gives examples from King Lear. The idea that wisdom is folly "for wise men are grown foppish" observes the Fool, "This (Fool) is not altogether fool, my lord", (b)lindness is insight "I stumbled when I saw" said the blind man and insanity (King Lear) is intellectual and moral clarity. She gives the example of the Knight Errand who is on a quest for the truth wandering on a quest for the truth.

Schultz then discusses how we achieve wrongfulness through our senses. "A lady once asked me if I believed in ghosts and apparitions. I answered with truth and simplicity. No, madam, I have seen far too many myself". She gives the example of John Ross captain of at ship leaving England to find the Northwest Passage in 1818. He finally got to Baffin Bay to find that the shoreline and mountains were some twenty miles ahead blocking a passage west. His following ship of his group came somewhat later and did not see what Ross reported and drew. Come to find out later Ross sae an optical illusion of shoreline and mountains beyond the curve of the earth placed twenty some miles away by a reverse layer of warm air under cold air. a mirage. For millenium we as a species believed that when standing outside at night (or the day) that the world was vaulted, the earth was flat and we stood at the center. Illusions are what we incorporate inside from what we perceive which come from our visual system which processes certain spectrum of light though other species have other visual information available that we lack. So what we perceive is a piece of reality now processed in our brains and interpreted according to our experiences. We are not a tabula rosa. For example, we have a blind spot where the optic nerve come into the retina in our vision but we must do some somersaults to find it since we have filled it in without consciousness. We do all sort of processing of the visual to conform to our view of reality. Besides optical illusions we have tactile, and auditory illusions. We sometimes hear things that are familiar or we can identify which are chimera. Ever have a tight fitting hat taken off and feel that the hat is still there?  She points out that the modern profession of magic of smoke and mirrors was used by Napoleon III  in Algeria when he employed a magician whose last name was Houdini (not Eric Weizs) to counter the priests and shamans in Algeria that were using their magic to convince people to rebel. Houdini did a great job is showing the power of magic from Europe. Napoleon III prevailed. Our inattention blindness is dramatically seen in the experiment in which observers are asked to watch a basketball game and count the balls bounces. A person in a gorilla uniform walks into the field and walks off bears his chest a few time and over 33-50% did not see the gorilla. 

 Shultz takes us on a journey into neurology and I'm reminded of the books of Oliver Sacks I read years ago for example The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. She describes the case of a woman with a stroke who was blind. When the interviewer talked with her she described the interviewer in detail his looks, what he was wearing and other fine details. But she was totally blind so these were all confabulations. She was unshakable in her view of true vision and no disability. "I know" seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as fact. One always forgets the expression "I thought I knew" Ludwig Wittgenstein On Certainty. She also describes the case of the Supreme court justice now disabled by a stroke causing paraplegia of one side of his body. He could not walk but when interviewed he describes his perambulations around the neighborhood that day. He appeared otherwise intact but did not recognize his disability and made up confabulated activities that he could not do. When asked to go for a walk with the interviewer he said that his arthritis was acting up so he preferred to sit in his chair. These are examples of Anton's Syndrome anosognosic confabulators. The split brain syndrome in people mostly post surgical procedures for intractable epilepsy errors and rationalizations for behavior I have described in previous post. 

Researchers in flashbulb memory used to think that these seminal memories were more accurate. Where were you 9/11 describe the events and your activities. Traumatic events have these qualities of being more real and vivid. Unfortunately though we believe their accuracy they often are inaccurate but the development of these memories have recently been studies to show us that perceptions is a process that we create inside our brains with many approximations and therefore room for errors. So these example highlight that we may be certain in our accuracy of perceptions and activities but very much wrong and in error. That state of mind of certainty is seperate from our also perceiving and thyen believing the reality of our perceptions which may be illusions of nature or of the profession of magic. Our memories are constructed inside our brain from different parts communicating and processing internal processes that then we conclude is real but contains approximations and errors sometimes very significantly. 

Confabulators without abnormal brain function can be an everyday occurance in ourselves. You and I go about our days with the assurance that the sun will rise and set, we will accomplish our tasks for the day and participate in in planned activities. The car will work when we drive it and we will carry on the next day. Are these facts? No. Assumptions O.K. Delusions that we function by to cope with the uncertainty of life and existence? Perhaps. Have you ever been in a discussion in which you were not an expert but gave your opinion then was challenged to support this opinion  and you made up knowledge and claimed expertise you did not have? Well, if you deny this ever happened either you're lying or confabulations and are delusional. It's very common and we probably do it very often. And we often are wrong! 

Shulz gives the example of Alan Greenspan the former chair of the Federal Reserve when in 2008 he was at a congressional hearing after the financial meltdown. He was a proponent of the free market philosophy that government should not interfere at all in the financial greed and business of the markets. The markets will rise to the occasion and knew better how adjust. Greenspan was the recipient of many honors and his book was well received. He had stopped certain people who had contrary views and were concerned about our economy from even publicizing their views since he felt this would disturb the pristeen process he believed in. At the congressional hearing he finally had to admit that his theory was wrong. The point here is that when we hold a belief often we are stubborn and will deny reality ro evidence to the contrary from entering our consciousness or if it does we will rationalize the evidence as inconsequential to our beliefs. So Shulz gives us the Jack Ass consequence of holding onto beliefs that are wrong. She also describes an interesting experiment called the Sally Ann test. Take an average four year old show him a puppet theatre in which Sally places an object in a draw and then leaves the scene and then Ann comes in takes the object and places it out of sight on the desk. Ask the 4 year old where Sally thinks the object is and the answer is on the desk! ask the 6 year old where she thinks it is and you get the draw. As an aside, Piaget studied his children mostly but then generalized to all of us on the development of cognition and beliefs as we mature. He coined a term conservation which has a similar development as in the Sally Ann experiment. "Conservation is one of Piaget's developmental accomplishments, in which the child understands that changing the form of a substance or object does not change its amount, overall volume, or mass. This accomplishment occurs during the operational stage of development between ages 7 and 11. You can often see the lack of conservation in children when there are, for example, several different sizes of juice on a table, and they choose the glass that is the tallest because they perceive the taller glass as having more juice inside of it (even though the tallest glass may also be the thinnest). All the glasses may have the same amount of juice in them, but children who haven't accomplished conservation will perceive the tall glass as being most full."

https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Conservation

These experiments help in understanding the theory of the mind. The interested reader can look at my previous posting concerning this our making narratives and stories and the theories of Fast and Slow thinking. Though our perceptions may be incorrect. Even our beliefs become immune to changes that other evidence supports. Shulz calls this Because I Its True! We counter others arguments and information with this reasoning. This is technically called the bias blind spot. Those of us (most of us) who practice this believe others hold different related beliefs simply because they are ignorant, are defective or ignorant, or they may even be evil.  

Evidence and beliefs require some more exposition. Our beliefs about the world serves us well often. We can figure out where we left out wallets, watches, phones and other objects. We can have a fairly good idea about how the people in our lives are doing. We can interpret their responses to us and negotiate conflict to better understanding. Our theory of the mind works pretty well in small groups, everyday activities, our professions and hobbies etc. However, if we read biased news because our beliefs lead us to these news sources, and we then know we're right when we're wrong and in error we are human, flawed, and easily driven to embarrassment, hatred, and isolation from aspects of reality that others can more readily see. In 1692 Judge William Stoughton presided over the Salem witch trials. He allowed evidence of the visitations by evil spirits be admitted into evidence in that court of law. 19 people were hanged. The strategy of guessing outcome from past evidence is called inductive reasoning. Here's the rub. Past experiences are as good as that evidence which from a probabilistic perspective is often right with enough evidence but not always so. Since we have biases our recognition of what is observed can be selective and therefore our conclusion may be skewed to support our biases. We may use confirmation bias selecting only those beliefs and information that supports our opinion (belief). Thomas Kuhn showed that often even in science biases present and skew the investigations and theories studies. When there is a paradigm shift in the theorizing and methodology advances occur. For example, before Copernicus the earth was the center but then with evidence and theories to explain the new findings from using the telescope suddenly it all shifted. Our confirmation biases are many sometimes benign sometime devastating producing unnecessary wars. Remember the weapons of mass destruction! Well we went to great lengths to deny contrary evidence and attempted to "prove" the belief through political maneuvering including Valeire Plames firing. Charles Darwin recognized confirmation bias by meticulously noting down all of his observations regardless of his inclinations to support his theories.  

I will continue my discussions of wrongfulness in a later post.

Leonard