The Mistake of Dualism

Of all the illusions that the mind bestows on us, one of the most invisible is the illusion that consciousness is a robust and ubiquitous presence in ourselves. We build ideas of the mind's working but we do so by mapping lessons we learn elsewhere in the world to it. To quote Cormac McCarthy:

"The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part"

The mind is chimeric in our visible universes and we are not equipped to understand it; we are equipped to understand where to find berries and how to associate sets of stimuli.

One of the recent illuminations that introspection has given me is to be skeptical of dualist concepts - that is, pairs of concepts, working differently but both explaining one thing, that we believe represent that thing correctly. For its part, dualism is a bad word in consciousness studies, and perhaps for good reason when you pull it apart in concept. Quite simply, dualism is the acceptance that no practical model exists for a phenomenon, so the next best thing is to have two that both do part of the job.

I had just woken today when I caught myself thinking that the man of id, confronted by dreams and instincts, is separate from the man of ego, reasoning what these things must mean and how to deal with them. But, in truth they are and can only be one man. The man of ego does not exist separate from the man of id; he is and has always been a product of their interaction, and vice versa. Instincts and logic are imperfect anchors; often so imperfect as to be inoperable. They do not have the luxury of existing in a vacuum; rather, they are always and everywhere set upon by external forces that they themselves affected but can never decidedly control.

Ultimately, dualism is a mental weakness. Dualities like this exist in our mind because of two facts:

1) We believe our minds police and enforce their own logical rigor; and

2) The mind does nothing of the sort

Such a combination is commonly known as a "cognitive bias". We may like to believe that we are more mentally resilient than we are, because our analysis of our resilience is a gestalt response, which itself is subject to all sorts of memory survivorship and other biases. Humans consistently overestimate their mental resilience in comparison to empirical testing.

A strange question to end with: would life be better or worse without cognitive biases? For my part, I'm not sure it would be possible to enjoy it at all.