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Change Blindness

The Situationist excerpted an article about change blindness and included this related video.

Were you taken in, even though you knew it was about change blindness? I don’t think this shows that we are deficient because we failed to notice what should have been obvious. As the article suggests, it would be dysfunctional to be aware of everything around us at that level of detail. Conscious thought is a limited resource because our brains are limited in size thanks in part to the limited size of women’s hips (I am sure mothers thank the stars that babies’ heads aren’t any larger). We just don’t have enough brain to take in more information.

Predictably, I thought about this in relation to Mormonism. The doctrines of Mormonism have changed radically over the course of its short history, yet people still insist that the Gospel according to Mormonism is eternal. Even in my own lifetime, doctrines have changed enough that I have noticed some changes.

Some may dismiss these as changes in Mormon folk doctrine, but that’s really all Mormon doctrine is. It lacks a defining written or oral creed, so everything is folk doctrine. That’s beside the point.

I’m talking about how unaware I was of these changes. I thought the changes in doctrine were minor and inconsequential. I absorbed this attitude from the people around me who all seemed to believe that the Gospel was unchanging. Why this belief despite ample evidence to the contrary?

The answer is complex, to be sure. Perhaps human change blindness can help explain some of it. If changes in doctrine are made quietly and slowly enough, it is quite easy to forget that we used to believe differently just a few years ago.

For example, I’ve recently learned that the LDS church has begun sealing women to more than one husband though not at the same time. Let me explain for anyone unfamiliar with the niceties of Mormon practice. A sealing is a marriage for “time and all eternity”, an eternal marriage. If a person’s eternal spouse dies, Mormonism considers them to still be married. So you can’t get sealed to another spouse after your first spouse dies because you’re still married to someone else.

Except that this is Mormonism and polygyny is okay. Men have long been allowed to be sealed to another woman as long as all previously sealed wives have died. Polyandry, on the other hand, isn’t kosher in the LDS church (even though Joseph Smith apparently practiced it), so women have only been allowed to be sealed to one husband ever. Make sense?

Anyway, that’s recently changed. As I mentioned, women are now allowed to be sealed to another man after their spouse dies. This may seem to some to be a small policy change, but this policy was based on the doctrine that polygyny was ordained of God while polyandry was not. I’m sure the rationale is that God will sort out in the world to come which (one) man the women will be sealed to forever.

I can’t help but speculate, however, that this represents another example of how Mormon doctrine changes over time without anyone suspecting it. Maybe a few years down the road Mormons will believe that God will also sort out which one woman a man will be sealed to, that polygamy was just a practical expedient here on earth to raise up Mormon seed to God, and that all polygamous sealings will be dissolved in eternity. That’s a long way from teaching that polygamy would be required of everyone who wanted to inherit the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom.

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Rationalizing Incest

Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that—was it O.K. for them to make love? (The Moral Instinct—via The Situationist)

Why? Leaving aside appeals to authority and tradition, explain you answer (in a comment if you like). I’ll wait.

Did you have a hard time justifying your answer? Some psychologists suggest that this is because our moral judgments aren’t based on reason and logic alone. In this example, we are born with a strong, visceral aversion to incest that defies rationalization. We would like to think that we are rational beings who make conscious decisions, but the truth seems to be that we are largely driven by instincts, the endowment of our evolutionary past.

Jonathan Haidt suggests that human beings have five innate moral senses:

  • aversion to harming innocents
  • fairness
  • community or group loyalty
  • respect for authority
  • purity

These affect us at an unconscious level. Each person and culture mixes these traits differently. Taking myself as an example, my loyalty to the group seems pretty low. This allowed me to leave the Mormon community. This shouldn’t be too surprising because I’ve grown up in a culture that strongly values individuality. My culture stresses fairness to the individual and its rights over respect for community or authority. Aversion to the incestuous scenario above probably triggers our desire for purity for another example.

The instinctual nature of our morality is part of the reason that I have little time for formal ethics. Morality seems to boil down to what humans want, not some abstract set of laws that we can discover given enough time and brainpower. Moral laws look nothing like mathematical or physical laws in this respect.

[By the way, catchy title, eh? :) ]

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Trick-or-Treat Bias

I’m on candy-bowl duty here at the house while Lacey takes the girls around trick-or-treating. I’ve observed that I’m biased with the candy. I want to give out more candy to kids who I think are cute. And I had a really hard time not giving more candy to the four attractive teenage girls (approximately 16–17 years old) in matching babydoll outfits with short skirts. Biology influenced psychology in action!

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I’m Objective, You’re Biased

The Situationist (one of my new favorite blogs) posted about our ability to judge our own bias relative to others’.

Because bias tends to occur non-consciously, searching for it in one’s explicit thoughts is a little like looking for one’s car in the refrigerator. In assessing other peoples’ bias, however, we tend to look at their behavior.

In other words, we overestimate our ability to judge the intentions of our own mind. We scan our conscious thoughts for bias even though bias is often unconscious and therefore opaque, even to ourselves. We don’t know ourselves as well as we think.

People’s willingness to recognize their own biases is, of course, an important first step in prompting them to correct for and overcome those influences. Once people are able to recognize that they can be biased without knowing it, perhaps they can stop relying on their good intentions and introspectively clean consciences for evidence of their own freedom from biases that range from corrupt, to discriminatory, to unfairly conflictual behavior. From that more humble starting point, they may be more open to engaging in efforts to rid themselves of their own biases and to understanding how others can be biased without knowing it. Such efforts are not just scientifically sensible, they are socially wise.

So there is hope.

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DNA Discovered while on LSD

Francis Crick discovered the secret structure of DNA while on LSD. He was accustomed to using low doses of the drug to increase mental function which reminds me of the juice of Sapho from the David Lynch film based on Frank Herbert‘s Dune. Mentats were human computers.

Unlike computers, however, Mentats are not simply human calculators writ large. Instead, the exceptional cognitive abilities of memory and perception are the foundations for supra-logical hypothesizing. Mentats are able to sift large volumes of data and devise concise analyses in a process that goes far beyond logical deduction: Mentats cultivate “the naïve mind”, the mind without preconception or prejudice, that can extract the essential patterns or logic of data, and deliver useful conclusions with varying degrees of certainty. (Mentat)

In the imaginary world of Dune, Mentats used the juice of Sapho to increase their considerable abilities even further. Perhaps LSD was Crick’s juice of Sapho allowing him to see the essential pattern of the DNA molecule by laying aside preconceptions and self-critical thoughts.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed,
the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning.
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
(Mentat Mantra)

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