Commune with Correctness.
“We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.”
Steven Pinker
When the world was wild, our minds were tame.
In 1976, the Hokule’a canoe voyaged from Hawaii to Tahiti using only traditional navigation techniques. The captains of this 2,700-mile journey relied only on the sun, stars, wind, and waves. It showcased humanity's capacity to pay attention and commune with the environment, noticing and skillfully responding to nature’s signals—a skill we all once possessed. In the days of old, we had to deal with immediacy and danger, and so we had to pay attention. Before formal theoretical and linguistic systems arose, we structured our understanding of the world with symbols, myths, and rites, as Mircea Eliade writes.
These pre-literary structures reflected an archaic ontology of aliveness and vitality. Myths were enacted, and provided perspective and a sense of belonging, assuring us that our lives were part of a larger cosmic web. Acting in a prescribed manner, Eliade says, is a repetition of the paradigmatic act of that type, enabling humans to emulate a celestial archetype. Your marriage is the repetition of the cosmic marriage. Your birth, a repetition of the cosmic creation. Rituals imbue the mundane with sacrality, allowing one to live in myth and thereby dwell with the divine.
And then we became enamoured by the Word. Words offer finality. Once something is named as a thing, we are liable to lose sight of the underlying process. We step out of a sacred and alive world, and in exchange, we receive regularity, structure, and safety. And this tradeoff has served us well, yet as we delve deeper into a world of sterility and silicone, we must not forget what has shaped us. We must not forget that our bloodline has tracking at its core - from tracking the sun and stars, to tracking prey. And now, in the modern age, our task is to track the truth. To find the trail of the real and follow it. Our problems are no longer avoiding predators and enduring harsh conditions, but aligning our values as a species and avoiding existential risks.
The hardware of the human body has not changed dramatically in the past several thousand years and, thus, both ancient mythologies and modern narratives are tracking the same perceived reality.
To explore how to stay on track and live vital lives, we must examine the evolutionary factors that have shaped our perceptions. From there, we can recover the kernel of the real, and become acquainted with the breadcrumbs of reality. Defining correctness is more slippery than ever, and the stakes are higher than ever.
Causality is a fact.
In the human realm, cause and effect is law. As we have evolved from apes of the plain to space-bound beings, causality has been our shaper.
“Natural selection subjects all traits to the most exacting tests, and the best designs win out” Nick Lane
Our species has undergone exacting tests, which are simply events in our environment that have led to the survival and demise of beings. Those who survive have the ability to pass on their genes. These tests do not have any goal of creating the ultimate organism, they are simply natural occurrences in the environment. Adaptation to one set of factors does not guarantee adaptation to any others. As events of a cataclysmic nature continue to occur, from weather to predators to scarcity, it is clear that to live in a state of reactivity is to be at the whim of ever-changing conditions. What is the best strategy for survival in a wild world?
Predicting is more effective than reacting.
In all activities, if your model of reality is more predictively potent, you become more capable in various situations. Creatures learn from their environments, forming internal models of the external world. As new sensory inputs arrive, they adjust their mental models to minimize predictive errors, enhancing their ability to respond effectively to changing conditions. This continuous refinement leads to better adaptation and improved decision-making.
The best internal model is the least dependent on external inputs from the environment.
In Classical Mechanics, a particle's state is defined by its position and momentum, where momentum combines mass and velocity. If you had a model that could predict outcomes using only a particle's position, it would be more efficient. For example, if a lion is in front of you and your brain can predict its movements based solely on its position (with no need to account for its current speed or size), your model is computationally superior.
If both you and a friend use position-only models, the better model operates with the least information. If your friend detects the lion's threat from just a single photon, while you require its full outline, your friend's model is more efficient and better suited for survival, quickly identifying threats with minimal data.
Evolution optimizes for survival not truth
In our example, your friend's model is highly predictive and survival-oriented, but it raises questions about their perception of reality. Since, in an adaptive sense, they have no need to perceive movement and mass, is reality just a collection of stationary point-like objects? Since it's inefficient to process the entire lion, why would their inner world depict a lion (in the conventional furry sense) at all? The optimal strategy for survival, seems to be for our brains to create minimal representations of reality.
The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism is Alvin Plantiga’s suggestion that if our cognitive faculties evolved purely for survival, their reliability in producing true beliefs is questionable. Evolution prioritizes survival over truth. In this vein, Donald Hoffman proposes an Interface Theory of Perception, arguing that our perceptions are like a computer's user interface, shaped by evolution to enhance survival. Just as a desktop interface simplifies complex processes, our perceptions offer a user-friendly view of reality, not an accurate depiction. When we click icons on our computer, we are not manipulating semiconductors ourselves, but through our manipulation of icons, the underlying electronic reality of the computer is being modulated. Does the way we perceive reality work like this to? Is everything, from color and form to mass just icons representing a deeper and inaccessible reality? Is real reality an array of objects of which we have no access?
How can we commune with correctness if the very mechanisms that have shaped the evolution of our perceptions have not optimized for correctness, but for survival?
Correctness is simply what appears.
Story-telling, meaning-making, myth-weaving - it all comes to a stop. Whether or not our perceptions reflect the so-called ‘actual nature of reality’, we must take them seriously. Otherwise, we betray our instincts and lose sight of our evolutionary heritage. If we do not accept the reality of our perceptions - we are bound to be confused and bewildered. A human who spends too long questioning whether the lion is truly a four-legged, yellow beast will find those to be their last thoughts.
“Using the mind to look for reality is delusion. Not using the mind to look for reality is awareness” Bodhidharma
Perhaps our perceptions are simply a low-resolution rendering of a deeper reality - but this doesn’t make them any less correct or true. The folk notion of truth as a one-to-one correspondence of external reality to internal reality is long gone. We don’t even have the computational hardware to reproduce reality one-to-one. It is for this reason we are experts at prediction. And perhaps this world of predictions is 99% of what appears to us - our brain is feeding our awareness a self-generated reality, every perception merely an icon representing a forever imperceptible reality. But whether our perceptions are God’s cosmic dream or our brain’s virtual reality - it is what it is.
To commune is to bring together, to commune with reality at its deepest level is to live fully in the world of appearances, and to bring them into harmony with the knowledge that our perceptions are constructed by processes beyond our control. To live in reality as it is now is to track the truth. To track truth is to solve the problems of the day. We must be present to what is happening as it is happening.
This is the union of appearance and depth - to acknowledge that we must take our appearances seriously, but, through understanding depth, we need not take appearances literally.
Communion with correctness is to head the advice that the Buddha gave to Bahiya.
“In reference to the seen, there will only be the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard…in reference to the cognized, only the cognized” Bahiya Sutta
Be present for the occurrence of the world at your sense doors. Respond to it as it arises. As long as you cultivate the capacity to endure the present moment, your body will know what to do next. We were once confronted with hunting and gathering, now we are confronted with fake news and overstimulation. Solving the latter is not a departure from our humanity, nor is it any less dire, it is what must be done as humans of this age. To do what nature is asking of you is to commune with correctness.