In the last year or so, I’ve barraged myself with media that has forced me to reflect on fundamental assumptions about how my mind works.
These assumptions are the theory of mind — the idea that individuals carry with them beliefs and desires that drive their actions — and agency, the idea that we have some control over those beliefs and desires and can purposefully aim them toward some end that satisfies deeply held needs.
I’m a very basic person, so like many in the post-2016 hectic social climate I’ve been spending time on mindfulness, paying attention to what thoughts surface and how my emotions rise in response to circumstances and drive further thoughts. After bouncing off of several paths, I found an app (of course) that clicked, and have since tried to make meditation a part of my daily routine.
One of the first things you discover after getting past the initial hurdles in directing attention inward is that you have very little control over the thoughts that surface in your head. It starts as the frustrating part of getting into the practice: “When I try to sit for 20 minutes, my brain won’t shut up!” But as you progress, and manage to slow down and diffuse attention, it takes on a dimension of epiphany: “I have no idea why my brain surfaced these particular thoughts into consciousness.” This realization can do significant damage to one’s understanding of their identity, beliefs, desires, and sense for whether any of those things are meaningfully under one’s control.
Additional damage to my understanding of these things came from two books highlighting a few threads in contemporary neuroscience.
“How History Gets Things Wrong” by Alex Rosenberg makes the case that looking to narrative histories to derive lessons about how to act in future circumstances is foolhardy, because there is no way for historians to truly divine the beliefs and desires that drove individual actors in those moments. He then goes further in his attack on this way of thinking about history, drawing on neuroscience’s understanding of how the brain forms memories to claim that there aren’t really beliefs and desires represented in any meaningful way in the brain — rather, there are complex sets of neural connections strengthened by positive rewards to acting on their presence or weakened by negative responses or long periods of irrelevance.
Rosenberg doesn’t make this connection, but this argument made me think of the phenomenon of preference falsification — of course people put on a front of believing things that don’t ring true, if social responses continually reward espousing those beliefs. And what we see on social media is this phenomenon amped up by interactions with significantly more sources of positive or negative reward, driving polarization in our lines of thinking to extremes and cutting off room for nuance. Ultimately, Rosenberg takes this way of thinking to his own extreme, dedicating a late chapter to stanning Jared Diamond, eloquently making the case that “Guns, Germs, and Steel is right! The only thing shaping history is material circumstances in specific locations! Individuals essentially didn’t matter!”
“Talent is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin somewhat echoes lines of thinking in Rosenberg’s work. It makes the case that there is little evidence of innate talent, of genetic predisposition to or skill for achieving elite performance in particular fields. At most, Colvin writes that there may be some genetic component to performing elements of some techniques that drive early wins when one pursues a particular activity, and that this early progress serves as reward that positively reinforces pursuing that activity, spinning up a flywheel of interest that can transform into long term engagement and growth. But the initial and continued engagement is also largely shaped by external environmental factors, like whether musical instruments or programmable computers were available or whether parents were willing/able to provide coaching or put in the time/money to make coaching available from a young age.
Colvin ends on a note that’s a bit less environmentally deterministic. While the circumstances around an individual can point them toward an interest and drive their progress in attaining skills, at some point the rate of incline for making progress versus some level of effort becomes quite steep. Colvin argues that what distinguishes those who achieve elite performance is a self-perception that greater performance is within reach, if only one could isolate specific elements of their technique and get feedback on how different ways of attempting the technique translate to different outcomes. If you don’t believe you can sustain personal growth, you won’t, even if you started with some innate advantages.
That conclusion resonated with something that I’ve long felt — that acting “as if” something is true can often be more important than its objective truth. In many cases, acting this way can even reshape reality, with sustained effort leading to changes in circumstances that lead to something foolhardy becoming possible and then inevitable. Even if we’re fundamentally biological automatons, walking wetware destined to act based on our genes and the environment we’re born into, too deeply internalizing that perspective leads to stasis and a bias toward reactivity. I’ve never been a spiritual person, but exploring these ideas has given me a greater appreciation for what it means to have faith. I’d rather believe that neuroscientists will go on to discover how incredibly complex layers of neural connections end up representing beliefs and ideas at higher levels of abstraction, that we’re not simply trained-response machines. I’d rather act as if I have agency, as if I can direct my actions toward specific ends and personal growth, and that cultivating a sense of held beliefs and desires and acting on them will lead to some form of self-actualization. Assuming that you have agency is what gives you agency — or at least, the very powerful delusion that you do.