Hermeneutic lock-in

The way we approach our inquiry into the universe is called hermeneutics. Hermeneutics refers to the way of thinking, and the underlying approach we use to make sense of what we experience. 

Our hermeneutics is so deeply ingrained within us that we are often unaware of its existence and the way it biases our thinking. As the saying by the physicist Werner Heisenberg goes: 

What we observe is not the universe itself-- but the universe that is exposed to our method of inquiry 

We get answers based on the kinds of questions we ask-- and while we are so obsessed with the answers, we often forget to inquire into our method of questioning itself. 

Let me illustrate with an example. This video called "A tale of two brains" by Mark Gungor is quite popular on the Internet: 

According to this theory, men's brain are characteristically different from women's brain. Men's brain categorises the universe into neat little boxes, and thinks only within that box. It puts back one box before taking on another. On the other hand, in women's brains everything is connected to everything else, and the entire connected web runs on an energy called emotion. 

The argument in the video is compelling, and as seen by the comments, this theory is quite popular. But if we notice carefully, according to this theory, this theory itself is a "men's brain" kind of theory-- that categorises brains into neat little boxes called men's brain and women's brain!! 

Maybe, seen from another perspective-- a perspective called "women's brain" by this theory, a brain is considered functional only when it has some form of connection from any concept to any other concept. A brain where concepts are partitioned into disconnected compartments may be considered dysfunctional.  Hence, anyone who claims to have a "men's brain" may well be claiming to have a dysfunctional brain according to this method of inquiry! 😁

I'm not commenting on which way of thinking is the "correct" one-- just observing that there may be multiple methodologies of inquiry which may all be consistent and sound in themselves. 

The  above is my favourite example of what I call a hermeneutic lock-in. We have been so conditioned to think in a specific way-- in this case, the way of "reductionism" or "divide and conquer" where we breakdown the universe into neat little categories and sub-categories, until we are able to tackle the complexity-- that we are pretty much unaware of it. 

This reductionist way of engaging with the world around us has given certain benefits, but it also has resulted in several problems like over-segregation, alienation, stereotyping, etc. And to deal with the problems created by reductionism, we once again resort to reductionism and say "our brains are like this, and your brains are like that"-- which doesn't solve the problem. 

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One of the most common hermeneutic lock-in we see today in modern science, is what I call machine hermeneutics or the "clockwork" model of the universe. This is the hermeneutics of Newtonian mechanics that pretty-much still drives much of the dominant worldview today. 

In this method of inquiry, the physical universe is thought to be made of inanimate, impersonal objects, operating under the laws of physics, and creating a causal chain of events. While this method of inquiry works well for things like engineering and machine design, it is a different story altogether when it comes to fields like medicine or social science or administration. Here too, we use machine hermeneutics extensively-- and often disregard all other approaches. 

In medicine for example, until rececntly in India, Western medicine was one of the many alternatives that existed, and was called the "Allopathic" form of medicine. But today, Allopathy has become mainstream and everything else has become "alternative" medicine, which are equated on par with witchcraft and pseudoscience. When someone says they are studying medicine, no one asks them which kind of medicine are they studying, anymore-- it just means they are studying Allopathy.

I have a personal example of how machine hermeneutic lock-in of Allopathy has affected me. 

Some years ago, I had to undergo a surgery in my temple area in response to a neural degeneration problem I had been having. The surgery took place under general anaesthesia, and right from the moment I woke up after surgery, I started feeling a lack of sensation in my pelvis area. I mentioned this to the doctor, and he said that the two are not connected-- as he never touched anything near the pelvis area. He suggested that it is probably the effect of the general anaesthesia, and it will wear off soon. 

But the lack of sensation remained for days and weeks, and continues to do so to this day! This lack of sensation directly affects my food digestion and other downstream activities. So much so that I need to be greatly wary of what I eat today, and the subdued activity in that part of my body has resulted in several other forms of chronic pains and aches. 

However, every allopathic doctor I went to, only said that the lack of sensation in my pelvis has nothing to do with the surgery in my head area, as there is no causal link between the two. I was sent to specialists who deal with the pelvis area, who could not find anything wrong there either (like a tumour or something). I had been telling them that my lack of sensation there is due to my nerves, but they didn't have any standard procedure for such a condition. 

Only recently, a practitioner of an "alternative" form of medicine (which was once the "mainstream" form of medicine in India) had a completely different explanation for what was happening within me. 

The human body is not at all designed like a machine-- although it is treated as one, by medicine practitioners. Our body is made up of trillions of building blocks called cells, which act autonomously and cooperates and competes with other cells in the body. In that sense, our bodies are more like societies, than machines. When new cells are born, they are in a nascent state and are called "stem" cells. The stem cells can go on to become any specific kind of cell-- like a muscle, cartilage, nerve, blood cell, bone cell, etc. as it "grows up". In fact, the probability that a stem cell becomes a specific kind of cell, depends on the economic demand for that kind of cell. Hence, if we exercise regularly, the economic demand for muscle cells go up, and more muscles are formed. If we read regularly and keep ourselves intellectually active, the economic demand for brain cells go up. Typically, just like what happens in a society. 

But more than just autonomous actions, all cells of our body are characterized by a pervasive sense of self. They know that they collectivevly belong to this body and not some other body. In fact, when we are grafted with an organ from some other donor, it is often the case that our own cells reject it as a foreign body. Our immune system relies critically on this pervasive sense of self. To keep ourselves immune from infection, white blood corpuscles in our blood stream routinely mark foreign cells that are potentially harmful, to be removed by the spleen. For this, they somehow know which cells belong to this body and which are foreign cells. 

The explanation to what was happening in my body was based on this pervasive sense of self across all my cells. When one part of my body was subject to surgery, it underwent trauma. This was interpreted as an attack on me, by some other part of my body, which then went into an introverted state as a trauma response. (Actually, the doctor's explanation used different terminology based on a notion of chakras, but I'm renarrating it using terms that are relatable by modern medicine). 

To give another example, some years ago, in New Zealand, there was a horrific incident, where a man went on a shooting rampage in the religious place of some community that he hated. He even live-streamed his rampage on social media, which had resulted in a shock worldwide. A few months later, in Sri Lanka, a member of the same religion that was affected in New Zealand, went on a bombing spree in several places of worship, killing hundreds of people belonging to the religion of the perpetrator in New Zealand. 

There was no physical causal link between the incidents in New Zealand and Sri Lanka. It is just that the perpetrator in Sri Lanka identified with the same religion as the victims in New Zealand, and ended up killing several people who identified with the same religion as the perpetrator in New Zealand. 

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Associations of identity have no fundamental axiomatic place in machine hermeneutics. Identity dynamics operate in a very different way from physical causality. It is very hard (with our current method of inquiry) to predict actions that are performed based on identity. Recently, there was another news report that a well respected doctor in Pune, who had made important contributions to the field of medicine, was arrested because he was also recruiting people for a terror organization! Conventional wisdom about education leading to moderate and responsible behaviour, does not hold true when one has a strong sense of identity towards some external entity or ideology. 

Wigh digital technology pervading around the world and connecting it like ever before, we will only see several more instances of identity-related dynamics, for which, we are woefully ill-equipped with our deep-rooted training in machine hermeneutics. 

Belief and Identity

Today was one of those rare occasions where I felt completely relieved of all forms of existential crisis for some time, and knew that I was exactly where I should be. As an academic, it is my good fortune to meet some very bright minds-- some of whom have come together to start a Philosophy Club. 

Today's discussion was on the issue of identity. 

I have talked extensively about our cognitive faculty of identity in earlier posts. We all possess an "elastic" sense of self, where we often identify with some elements of our external world, and act in its interest. For instance, we often identify with our family, our religion, culture, country, profession, gender, etc. 

Identity associations are fundamentally different from rational associations. In the latter, we associate with something because we expect to derive a value from that association. Identity associations are different. When we identify with something-- we act as if that something is part of us. We actively work in its interest, regardless of whether it is doing well or not. It is only because parents identify with their children, they stick with them through thick and thin, and work in their children's interest. If parents were to have a rational association with their children, there would be no incentive at all, to bring up kids! 

As we were speaking about identity, a question was posed today by one of the participants. What is the difference between identity and deeply held beliefs (called Samskara in Sanskrit)?

In both cases we are driven by something that is deeply ensconced within us. While trying to unravel the difference between the two, here is what we realised. 

A belief-- whether deeply held or not-- represents an objective construct. It constrains, directs and regulates how we interpret our experiences. For instance, if someone held a deeply held belief saying, "Indians are all unreliable"-- this would influence how they interpret whatever they hear or see an Indian do. Because this belief is deeply held, they may not be aware of this biased interpretation, but it is there. It has somehow entered their psyche and has lodged itself deeply. 

In contrast to deeply held beliefs that affect the way we interpret the external world, identity is a subjective construct affects our self image and who we think we are. Identifying as X, means that we are inherently saying "I am X". 

However, just like beliefs, our identities can be curated by us or from external factors. We can be told or conditioned to identify as X by external factors. 

This brings us to the crucial point in this post. The moment we become aware of our identity, we realise that we are not what we identify with! Since our identity can be curated by both external and internal means, the locus of our self lies beyond our identities! 

Hence, as long as we identify with X, we are implicitly saying "I am X" and acting as if we are X. But the moment we become aware of this, we convert our identity into a belief! We then effectively say, "I believe I am X", and have objectified our identity and thus have also told ourselves that we are not X, and we are only "identifying" with X. 

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This discussion today, helped me understand why I'd been sceptical about this whole hype around gender identities and people putting their preferred pronouns in front of their names. 

Our gender identities may be fluid and our sense of gender may differ from the biological sex assigned at birth. Someone who does not identify with their gender assigned at birth, experiences gender dysphoria. They feel different internally, from how they get treated by the outside world. 

But the moment they say "I identify with this gender"-- if they mean this genuinely-- it means that they have actually gone one epistemological level beyond identification with their gender! This is because, "I identify with this gender" is now an objective statement and their core being is beyond this gender identity. 

If someone just asserts "I identify as X and you need to call me with these pronouns" it means that they possess this statement as a belief and not as their identity! For someone who is identifying as X, they would be acting as X without being aware of it, and not be saying that they are X. If we genuinely mean what we say when we say that we identify as X, then somewhere, we have also identified ourselves as something beyond X. 

This is like the impostor syndrome-- one who has an impostor syndrome does not keep talking about their impostor syndrome or keep bringing it up. They just suffer with a belief that they are impostors and don't deserve what they have. If somebody keeps complaining about their impostor syndrome, then they have either already overcome their impostor syndrome, or didn't have it in the first place.

Similarly, someone who goes about saying that they are right-brained and creative individuals, are most likely left-brained. Because it is the left brain that thinks in terms of categories like left-brain and right-brain. For the right-brain, we either have a brain or no-brain. 

Gender fluidity is one thing. But for someone to proclaim themselves to belong to some gender and demand others to treat them in a particular way-- is not very convincing. Either they have realised their gender fluidity-- for which, they need to identify themselves as something beyond their gender-- in which case, it doesn't matter how others view them and they are happy to be just viewed as humans; or this gender identity is forced, being used more as a mask or a persona, than what they really feel inside. 

Ideas and identities

For a long time now, I have resisted any effort to bring research on topics like language, culture and history into my lab. It is not that I think that these topics are unimportant. But it is because I think that as a society, we do not have the skill to extract ideas from identity for scholarly perusal.

Topics like language, culture, history etc. are teeming with issues and controversies regarding social and cultural identities. Identity driven politics is an intense element that we endure daily.

A research lab is by definition, a battleground. It is a battleground for ideas, where ideas clash and transform and evolve.

But when identities masquerade as ideas, it spells nothing but trouble.

A clash of ideas is invigorating, dispassionate and impersonal. We end up energised and enthusiastic after a successful clash of ideas.

A clash of identities is disspiriting, passionate and deeply personal. We end up feeling battered and bruised after a clash of identities.

Much of the issues in academic environments (including the recent JNU controversy) are because of our collective inability to separate ideas from identity.

A clash of ideas makes no noise and is hardly apparent to anyone other than those involved in the clash. A clash of identities on the other hand, spills over to the streets, gets paraded on news hour, along with a whole lot of other dispiriting elements.

Ideas do not have boundaries, while identities do. Cultures that are supposedly enemies of one another, watch each other so much with trepidation, that they end up exchanging and adopting ideas from one another.

One of the worst things one can do to subjugate others is to impose our idea of their identity on them. And that is what happens quite routinely, in studies of language, culture and history. Sure, there objective elements of language, culture and history; but these things are also deeply personal. Oh, and let us not even talk about religion.

The origin of language and culture is the human mind. The language that we speak is created by us in our minds. We only borrow linguistic constructs like vocabulary, metaphors, etc. from whatever we interact with, to help in reducing the effort in building our language.

Similarly, culture is an emergent characteristic of our values and the way we interact with others when driven by our values. We borrow cultural constructs from the environment, but it is we who create our culture.

If an alien virus were to infect the human race such that, the human mind were to stop functioning and stop interpreting our world, language and culture would cease to exist.

The same is true with history and religion. We all have our personal history and a personal sense of spirituality. The objective elements of history and religion we study are driven by clash of identities to result in some dominant idea.

None of the above arguments imply that we should stop studying subjects like language, culture, history and religion. If anything, these subjects require a lot more discipline than the study of the impersonal physical world or the elegant mathematical world. A discipline that requires one to separate ideas from identities and allow the ideas to clash in a way that is elucidating and empowering, rather than passionate and disspiriting.

Sure, all of us like to believe that we have such a discipline. But allow me to be sceptical of such over confidence.