Social Components of Intelligence
In a recent entry, (see Networks of Public Spaces Rather Than One Square), I spoke of the confusion that diversity can cause to us as we go about our daily activities. I spoke as if it were a matter of needless expenditure of energy but now I wonder if it might be deeper than that. I should have suspected so because I made a reference to some entries I wrote on my other blog (starting with Adaptive Minds: A Review of “Adaptive Minds”, Part I) where I discussed the work of Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist who has shown that some of our thinking is done in interaction with our environments and not just inside our isolated heads as most would assume. It’s even proper to say that some of our thinking is done by our environments.
The more radical and more consistent position on moral matters, which I should have taken, is that social confusion caused by uncontrolled diversity or other factors will obscure or cripple much of our moral knowledge and our moral reasoning skills because that confusion on our streets and in our malls and on our television sets is part of our thinking. We become stupid because of the confusion and social disorder around us. We don’t just have to work harder to determine if that fellow behind the counter is trustworthy. We simply are obtuse and may not even be aware of the reasons for our own discomfort.
It takes a great effort to be morally intelligent in the modern age and it might still be impossible if we don’t find good communities which can do some of our thinking for us. This should hardly be a surprise to Christians who have the goal of becoming part of the body of Christ, rather than the goal of spending eternity doing our own thing.
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To See a World in a Grain of Sand 
September 10, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Well … that we are also influenced by our enviroment and pretty sure very much so is not too new, is it? But are the conclusions right? because of course the human being is not absolute – literally meaning detached, but rather in relatio – that’s where relations come from. Then every existing being is bound and defined also by relations anyway. You can look into Cusanus for that. The question is … are we totally determined by others being what we are … Martin Buber would maybe think so … or doesn’t interacting mean also that there is a constantly developing relation between me (and then there has to be a me which can also think by its own) and the others? Television, internet etc then would be nothing more than more relations which have to be questioned just the same as always.
September 11, 2007 at 9:42 am
No, you’re right there’s nothing new to my speculation. The Bible, novels, historical writings, philosophical writings all warn us that we are shaped by others. My point on this line of thought has been that our assumptions and our language in the modern world assume we are autonomous agents who interact without being changed in our essence and that’s a wrong way to view ourselves. I covered this issue for the non-living world elsewhere. See A Christian view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality.
The difficult task remains: how to update concepts and forge new words to combat that erroneous way of viewing ourselves that we inherited from the early modern thinkers?
But I’ve also speculated in some of my writings that our selves actually overlap our bodily boundaries, partially existing in our immediate environments and maybe in the universe as a whole if we are able to shape our minds properly. This seems more radical than the specific findings about cognitive processes that we find in the writings of Gerd Gigerenzer but do seem consistent with those findings. I don’t know about non-Christians, but I think a Christian looking honestly at these issues has to realize that our true existence is as objects of divine love. The substantialist, even if not as radical as advocates of ‘human being as autonomous agent’, would have to think of God as being outside of us and making us before pouring down love upon us. I’m proposing a return to the view of St. John that God’s love for us was what brought us into existence.
September 11, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Great post!
We need Him more now than ever!
BigDadGib
September 11, 2007 at 10:28 pm
I totally agree with you that believing that the human self is autonom is an illusion or better … a misunderstanding auf the self how it emerged in the renaissance. RAther the human being then was not only object but rather subject at the same time. Like God loving himself with and through men. MAx Scheler for example developed a great philosophy about the men being an ens amans before everything else. But we have to remember that it is on a christian-hellenistic ground that such thoughts evolved on. No other religion (as far as I know) would believe that. On the contrary… But I wonder if the more urgent questions don’t come from the opposite direction right now? I am thinking of the discoveries the brain sciences are making right now, coming to the conclusion that there is no self at all. Not only Buddhism but also some christian and other (and not only contemporay) philosophers would agree with that. Isn’t that the greatest challenge right now?
September 12, 2007 at 9:48 am
Supsie, you’re slicing across reality in a slightly different direction from me and you’re also using a somewhat different vocabulary. I’ll have to continue think about how we differ and agree. I think we agree almost completely.
I’ve said in some of my writings that we’re born to develop, or fail to develop, into true persons in response to our environments, especially in response to our mothers when we’re young and to a variety of human beings as we grow. It’s a historical process and the person or self we become differs according to our responses. We become different by responding to God while Enlightenment intellectuals and the Christians who borrowed too much from them talk as if we’re the same person whether we accept God’s offer of salvation or not. The most important of decisions might affect our fate but not our person or self. Far too many Christians who are orthodox in their basic beliefs also read modern ideas of self-hood or person-hood back into the writings of Augustine and Aquinas and Luther and lots of others who would consider those ideas strange. Those who’ve read serious political philosophy would know that these issues are the reason that thinkers like Oakeshotte and Minogue classify almost all modern political thinkers and politicians as ‘liberal’.
Anyway, to the extent that the human person or human self develops over time, it’s right to question the existence of a substantial and inherent self. On the other hand, I believe and I think you do as well that we’re born to develop into persons or selves if everything goes well and if we respond properly to our environments and eventually God. It does seem to be true that we can’t become any person we wish — our genes (from father and mother) and soma (from mother) do provide great but limited possibilities. As the authors of the Bible knew well. But we’re not born in a well-formed state inside those possibilities. I’ve read works by brain scientists who agree with the ‘Jesuit’ principle that our basic characters are formed by the age of 7 or so. In addition, the abstract components of our mind develop during adolescence — or fail to develop if something goes ‘wrong’ such as premature sexual maturing.
The process of developing the self-awareness which is the basis of person- or self-hood seems to be based on specific brain ‘linkages’. Recently, brain-scans of patients undergoing out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences have indicated strongly that it is the self-aware ‘circuitry’ that is disrupted during these events. There are also horrible cases of neglect or abuse of growing children which have left their brains, language abilities and self-awareness, in mutilated forms. Those who are dying or suffering from dementia also have damaged self-awareness. And I think most of us use human self or human person to refer to the self-aware human animal and not just the human animal which is aware in the more basic way of our apish cousins. That means our person- or self-hood can be destroyed by historical events.
The problem is very messy and we need the proper words and we might need to derive new concepts from modern empirical knowledge of self-awareness and related human traits. Part of my ‘crusade’ is to raise awareness of this need to deal with God’s world more openly and honestly and to stop pretending that the language and concepts we inherited is up to the task. St. Augustine didn’t assume that, nor did St. Paul before him nor St. Thomas Aquinas in a later century. But most modern Christian thinkers seem to think that the way to deal with modern empirical knowledge is to just produce more works based upon language and concepts developed to deal with empirical knowledge as it existed in 400AD or 1250AD. And we read that knowledge through the distortions of Enlightenment lenses. This is why we have a disconnect between science and theology, and modern philosophy is not really better connected to modern empirical knowledge than theology is.