Thougts about thinking on reading The Economist

I quote from The Economist:

Every week seems to yield a new discovery about how bad people are at making decisions. Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational. We buy things we don’t need, often at arbitrary prices and for silly reasons. Studies show that when a store plays soothing music, shoppers will linger for longer and often spend more. If customers are in a good mood, they are more susceptible to persuasion. We believe price tends to indicate the value of things, not the other way around. And many people will squander valuable time to get something free. 

The sudden ubiquity of this research has rendered Homo economicus a straw man.

I have used the phrase that "we think with our brains, not our minds" repeatedly in this blog, but it of course is wrong. We think with our genes and our bodies as well as our brains. Increasingly there is information that suggests genetic bases to the ways in which thinking goes.

If you have ever had a high fever and experienced "fever dreams" you know that you think differently, your brain operates differently if its temperature is not controlled within very tight limits. If you are really hungry or really thirsty, you think about food or water a lot. If the nerves communicating from the rest of your body to the brain demand attention, they tend to get it.

I guess the point is that we may be conscious, but we are not conscious of all that we think, much less the causes of what we think. We often rationalize what our brains have produced rather than think rationally.

It is also clear that the way we think is the cumulative response of the body's and especially the brain's history. People who have had major injuries to their brains obviously think differently after than before those injuries. Kids who are deprived of food, or whose bodies make demands on nutrients due to illness, or who are deprived of needed stimulation have their brains develop in ways that we think of as deprived. On the other hand, kids who are exposed to lots of music over their entire formative period actually have brains more attuned to music than their less musical peers.

And of course, schooling influences the way we think, as does exposure to media and self education. The Flynn effect is that there is, in many parts of the world, an increase in whatever it is that IQ tests test for over the last century. Intelligence and the way people think is malleable.

Sociologists also help us to understand that the societies (and local strata of those societies) in which we have been brought up and in which we live influence the way we behave, the way we think, who we are. Thus, these factors influence not only the way one talks, but what one talks about. We know that poverty is a predictor of criminality, and that there are differences among cultures in the average reported happiness of their members.

Another article in The Economist indicates that some rather complex appearing human behavior is eerily predictable:

From big events such as the London Olympics to the design of new railway stations, engineering firms now routinely simulate the movement of people to try to spot areas where crowding is likely to occur.

A typical project involves using off-the-shelf software programs to identify potential bottlenecks in a particular environment, such as a stadium or a Tube station. These models specify the entry and exit points at a location and then use “routing algorithms” that send people to their destinations. Even a one-off event like the Olympics has plenty of data on pedestrian movement to draw on, from past games to other set-piece gatherings such as, say, city-centre carnivals, which enable some basic assumptions about how people will flow.

Once potential points of congestion are identified, more sophisticated models can then be used to go down to a finer level of detail. This second stage allows planners to change architectural designs for new locations and identify when to intervene in existing ones. “There should be many fewer crowd disasters given what we now know and can simulate,” says Mr Helbing.

The Economist has a review this week of Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael Gazzaniga. Even the title leads to a lot of ideas.

The whole idea of social and economic development suggests an idea of "progress", that the way we think and behave can be changed. Foreign aid is based on the perception that financial and technical assistance from the outside can promote social and economic development. My long term interest in UNESCO is based on the hope and belief that it can help to develop a culture of peace, help to build the defenses of peace in the minds of men.

Equally, we see that some people as not having the capacity to adequately control themselves and make good choices -- children, the mentally impaired -- and excuse them from criminal liability for their actions.

"Free will" seems to be at least in part a myth or a superstition.The question is whether it is a useful one. We know that Newtonian physics is only an approximation to modeling the movement of objects, and that Einsteinian physics is more accurate, but we also know that Newtonian physics is useful and plenty good enough for many practical purposes. Is the "free will" model of human behavior similarly "good enough" for many practical purposes, albeit a model we may see is only approximate. Clearly so.

The question might be, where is the boundary at which we should not assume free will, but rather go to other models and consequently other approaches. I would suggest that dealing with addition is one such area. Criminal treatment of addicts to illegal drugs would seem to be based on the assumption that they freely choose their behavior; it might be better to recognize that addiction diminishes freedom of choice, and that dealing with addition as a medical or social problem might be more appropriate. That the limitation of freedom of choice to use or not use suggests that a model other the "free will" would be more appropriate.