What makes us adaptive also makes us self-deceptive.
How wisdom is the antidote to algorithmic conditioning of human consciousness.
Cognitive biases and evolution
Cognitive biases have evolved to organise the chaos of sensations which otherwise would overwhelm us. It’s a trade off: in order to have any comprehension of reality at all, we have to distort it. In other words, the evolutionary job of our brain is not to give us access to reality as it is, but to help us survive. If this means distorting reality in the process, so be it. But sometimes the cognitive distortion of reality goes too far so that our map of the world is too inaccurate to allow us to navigate safely through it.
Cognitive biases are shortcuts which use perceived universal patterns in the world to save us the effort to consciously reason through every single cognitive operation, like brushing teeth or driving a car—most of our decisions are automatic so that we can operate at all.
But when our thinking becomes stuck in its algorithmic automatism, it also loses its flexibility and its capacity for insight (a faculty of wisdom), which is the capacity for breaking the algorithmic frame of that which worked well in one context but doesn’t work any longer in a new one.
Transcontextual cultivation of wisdom
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from John Vervaeke—a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto and faculty member at the Sensemaking 101 course I took a couple of years ago—was: that which makes us adaptive also makes us self-deceptive.
For example, it was the hunter-gatherer’s top priority to detect the danger of wild animals and alien tribes, so that fight-or-flight response was critical for his or her survival. But even if these days we don’t face the same kind of threats, we are still cognitively hardwired for threat-detection. This makes us overreact, especially in times of endemic crises and oversaturation with information felt as the click-bait driven limbic hijack of what Tristan Harris calls ‘the race to the bottom of the brainstem.’
This mis-match between our cognitive hardware and cultural software makes us lose agency through likely paying attention to what’s most sticky, and not to what’s most important. Thus, much of our information ecosystem is optimised for dragging us into illusion, self-deception and bullshit.
The illusionist knows of this. He also knows how to exploit our cognitive biases to suit his own agenda, which is usually profit. If you have a team of Stanford behavioural engineers leveraging the exponential power of algorithm against the internet users’ hunter-gatherer brains, it is not going to end well—the result is the atavistic trio of polarisation, radicalisation and tribalism, as we are witnessing them unfolding in the digital trenches of narrative warfare.
Wisdom versus algorithm
As the saying goes, wisdom is the capacity to survive our own stupidity. As such, it requires us to take a hard look at ourselves and recognise when our bullshit doesn’t serve our highest good.
Wisdom, as inherently a non-algorithmic process, is our capacity to account for our own biases, and recognise when they become dysfunctional, e.g. when what seemed important yesterday becomes irrelevant today due to a change of circumstances. Wisdom is therefore a transcontextual (consistent across multiple contexts) and transperspectival (informed by the relationships between a diversity of perspectives). Wisdom is therefore the capacity for breaking out of maladaptive cognitive patterns by being able to notice what is important, rather than what is sold as important.
Cultivating wisdom as a form of self-transcending axiological rationality (grounded in intrinsic human values)—in contradistinction to the merely instrumental intelligence of algorithmic processing—is therefore, I argue, our competitive human advantage in the age of exponential AI.